The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization

Stalin’s death in 1953, and Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin in the ‘Secret

Speech’ of 1956, ushered in years of upheaval in Soviet society and party
policy. Many of these changes were linked to the desire to ‘de-Stalinize’
the Stalinist state, reducing its emphasis on terror and regimentation,
whilst also reinvigorating and revitalizing the socialist project. This volume
reveals the many meanings and consequences of the de-Stalinization that
was carried out under Khrushchev, with a particular focus on popular
opinion, Soviet identity, and social and cultural change.
The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization provides a comprehensive history of
Khrushchev-era reforms, about which a great deal of information has
become available since the opening of the former Soviet archives, casting
new light on how far official policies correlated with popular views. The
volume considers wide-ranging, but interlinked, developments in Soviet
culture including the renunciation of Terror, the denunciation of Stalin,
aesthetic experimentation and changes to the private lives of ordinary
Soviet citizens. Overall the book appraises the extent of ‘de-Stalinization’
and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for
reform, or merely an attempt to fortify the Soviet system along different
lines. Particular emphasis is placed on the varying interpretations of the
aims and extent of de-Stalinization that were advanced by different social
groups, suggesting the creation of a new, post-Stalinist relationship
between the party and the Soviet people.
This book presents the first wide-ranging and archivally based appraisal
of the social and cultural impact of de-Stalinization, and will be of interest
to scholars and historians with an interest in Stalin, Khrushchev and the
Soviet Union.

Polly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at SSEES-UCL. She has published art-

icles on the Stalin cult and de-Stalinization in the journals Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions, Genèses and Forum for Modern Lan-
guage Studies. She is co-editor of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictator-
ships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Palgrave, 2004).
BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European
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The Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction of the changes 1988–98
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Emergency powers and states of emergency
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23 The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization

Negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era
Edited by Polly Jones
The Dilemmas of
De-Stalinization
Negotiating cultural and social change
in the Khrushchev era

Edited by Polly Jones

First published 2006
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Contents

Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii
Glossary xiii

Introduction: the dilemmas of de-Stalinization 1

POLLY JONES

PART I
Responses to the Thaw(s): de-Stalinization and public
opinion 19

1 ‘Show the bandit-enemies no mercy!’: amnesty, criminality

and public response in 1953 21
MIRIAM DOBSON

2 From the Secret Speech to the burial of Stalin: real and ideal
responses to de-Stalinization 41
POLLY JONES

3 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? How the Secret Speech was

translated into everyday life 64
SUSANNE SCHATTENBERG

4 Naming the social evil: the readers of Novyi mir and

Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, 1956–59 and
beyond 80
DENIS KOZLOV
viii Contents
PART II
Forging old/new identities: de-Stalinizing the Stalinist self 99

5 Forging citizenship on the home front: reviving the socialist

contract and constructing Soviet identity during the Thaw 101
CHRISTINE VARGA-HARRIS

6 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood: the quest for moral

rebirth, 1953–58 117
ANN LIVSCHIZ

7 The arrival of spring? Changes and continuities in Soviet

youth culture and policy between Stalin and Khrushchev 135
JULIANE FÜRST

8 From mobilized to free labour: de-Stalinization and the

changing legal status of workers 154
DONALD FILTZER

PART III
Rewriting Stalinism: in search of a new style 171

9 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography, 1953–64 173

ROGER D. MARKWICK

10 The need for new voices: Writers’ Union policy towards

young writers 1953–64 193
EMILY LYGO

11 Modernizing Socialist Realism in the Khrushchev Thaw:

the struggle for a ‘Contemporary Style’ in Soviet art 209
SUSAN E. REID

12 ‘Russia is reading us once more’: the rehabilitation of

poetry, 1953–64 231
KATHARINE HODGSON

13 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia: science in schools

under Khrushchev 250
MICHAEL FROGGATT

Select bibliography 267

Index 276
Contributors

Miriam Dobson is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University

of Sheffield. She completed her PhD at SSEES-UCL in 2003, entitled
‘Refashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of
Destalinisation, 1953–64’.
Donald Filtzer is Professor of Russian History at the University of East
London. He has authored four major studies of Soviet workers in the
Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev periods: Soviet Workers and Stalinist
Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations,
1928–1941 (London, 1986); Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Con-
solidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964
(Cambridge, 1992); Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The
Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991 (Cambridge,
1994); and Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration
of the Stalinist System After World War Two (Cambridge, 2002).
Michael Froggatt is Lecturer in Modern European History at the Univer-
sity of Durham. He has recently completed his doctoral thesis at St.
John’s College, Oxford, on the portrayal of science and scientists in the
propaganda and popular culture of the Khrushchev period.
Juliane Fürst is a Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford.
She completed a PhD at the London School of Economics on youth and
youth cultures in late Stalinism. She is the author of several articles on
youth in the Stalin era, and is currently completing a book titled Stalin’s
Last Generation: Youth, Culture and Identity in the post-war Soviet
Union 1945–56.
Katharine Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of
Exeter. She has published books on the twentieth-century Russian poet
Ol’ga Berggol’ts, and on Russian poetry of World War II, as well as art-
icles about twentieth-century poetry and women’s writing.
Polly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at SSEES-UCL. She completed her
DPhil at Oxford in 2003. She is the author of several articles on the
x Contributors
Stalin cult and de-Stalinization, and joint editor, with Balazs Apor, Jan
Behrends and Arfon Rees, of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictator-
ships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Palgrave, 2004).
Denis Kozlov is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Slavic,
East European and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berke-
ley. His dissertation, ‘The Readers of Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-
Century Experience of Soviet Historical Consciousness’ (University of
Toronto, 2005), focused on the intellectual history of late Soviet reading
audiences. He has published articles in Kritika and Canadian Slavonic
Papers and co-edited, with Lynne Viola, Viktor P. Danilov and Nikolai
A. Ivnitskii, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930 (Yale University
Press, 2005).
Ann Livschiz is an Assistant Professor at the History Department at
Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. She received her
PhD from Stanford University for her dissertation ‘Growing Up Soviet:
Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’.
Emily Lygo wrote her doctoral thesis, a history and analysis of Leningrad
poetry 1953–75, at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is currently translating
a collection of Tat’iana Vol’tskaia’s poetry and prose, entitled Cicada
(Bloodaxe, Spring 2006).
Roger D. Markwick lectures in history in the School of Liberal Arts, Uni-
versity of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Rewriting History in
Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–74 (Pal-
grave, 2001), which in March 2003 was awarded The Alexander Nove
Prize in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. He is also the co-
author, with Graeme Gill, of Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gor-
bachev to Yeltsin (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Susan E. Reid is Senior Lecturer in Russian Visual Arts in the Depart-
ment of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield. She has
published widely on Soviet visual culture and gender from Stalin to the
1990s, with a focus on the Khrushchev period. She is editor, with David
Crowley, of Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in
Post-War Eastern Europe (Berg, 2000); and Socialist Spaces: Sites of
Everyday Life in the eastern Bloc (Berg, 2002).
Susanne Schattenberg is Assistant Professor of East European History at
the Humboldt-University at Berlin. Her PhD at the European-
University Francfurt-on-Oder concerned engineers in the 1930s, and
was published as Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik
und Terror (Munich, 2002). Since 2002 she has been working on a
project about the culture of foreign policy and the communication of
diplomats at the end of the Tsarist Empire.
Christine Varga-Harris completed her PhD in history at the University of
 Contributors xi
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Con-
structing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in Russia,
1956–64’. In an earlier article published in the Canadian Journal of
History, she addressed daily life and public discourse during the post-
war Stalin period. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at St.
Thomas University in Canada.
Acknowledgements

Permission from Palgrave Macmillan is gratefully acknowledged to use

material that first appeared in Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in
Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (2001,
Palgrave).

Illustrations
Figure 11.1 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving into the New Apartment,
1952. Permission to reproduce granted by Donetsk Regional Museum of
Art (Donetskii oblastnyi khudozhestvennyi muzei)
Figure 11.2 Nikolai Andronov, Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, 1957. Per-
mission to reproduce granted by Arkhangel’sk State Museum of Art
(Gosudarstvennoe muzeinoe ob’’edinenie ‘Khudozhestvennaia kul’tura
Russkogo Severa’)
Glossary

Note: archive name abbreviations can be found in the bibliography

Byt way of life, often carrying strong moralizing overtones.

Komsomol Party’s youth wing.
Kolkhoz Collective farm.
Lakirovka ‘lacquering’, ‘varnishing’, a key term in the debates about
Stalinist art in the Khrushchev years, accusing art of embellishing
reality and concealing problems.
LITO (literaturnoe ob’’edinenie, literary association) A literary associ-
ation or grouping below the level of (and sometimes independent of)
the Writers’ Union.
Orgnabor Labour recruitment.
Pioneers Party’s organization for children.
Sovnarkhoz (sovet narodnogo khoziaistva, council of people’s economy)
Regional Economic Councils set up by Khrushchev in 1957 to re-
organize the economy, switching from ministerial to regional adminis-
tration.
Partiinost’ ‘party-mindedness’, the reflection of party principles in, for
example, behaviour, writing.
Samizdat Form of publishing documents not publishable under Soviet
censorship, often using hand-typed or hand-written copies of docu-
ments, circulated informally and secretly.
Secret Speech Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin, ‘On the Cult of Person-
ality and its Consequences’, delivered to a closed session of the 20th
Party Congress, 25 February 1956.
Shestidesiatniki ‘Men/generation of the sixties’, a term usually used to
designate prominent cultural figures of the ‘Thaw’ years.
Stiliaga A term used to describe the loose phenomenon of fashion-
hungry youth in post-war USSR, translatable as ‘teddy boy’.
Tamizdat Publication of work not publishable under Soviet censorship
abroad.
‘Thaw’ One of the terms often used to designate the liberalization in the
xiv Glossary
Khrushchev years, especially in Soviet culture. Taken from the title of
Il’ia Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel, The Thaw (Ottepel’).
Vospitanie Upbringing, with implications ranging beyond parenting (e.g.
school, party).
Zek A Gulag prisoner (a colloquial abbreviation of zakliuchennyi,
‘imprisoned’).
Introduction
The dilemmas of de-Stalinization
Polly Jones

The Khrushchev era was a time of enormous changes, some contained in

the reforms of the post-Stalinist leadership, others spontaneously welling
up ‘from below’ after the end of Stalinism. The negotiations of the Stalin-
ist legacies bequeathed to Stalin’s successors after his death in 1953, until
the end of the Khrushchev era, are the subject of this volume. The dilem-
mas of de-Stalinization encompassed all realms of Soviet life, from party
politics to the economy, from art and literature to the writing of history,
from criminal justice to the maintenance of social order. In each of these
realms, the sudden absence of Stalin, whose charismatic authority had sub-
stituted for real political legitimacy, forced his successors to sift the legacy
of Stalinism to determine how much of it should be preserved, and how
much discarded.1
These dilemmas were both positive and negative. On the one hand, the
passing of Stalin made it easier to justify and then implement reforms
which were long overdue, but had been largely held in check by the petri-
fied system of late Stalinism.2 By 1953, the Soviet system was in a state of
economic, social and cultural crisis.3 The death of Stalin permitted, and
indeed compelled, a discussion of the reasons and possible solutions for
this catastrophic state of affairs. On the other hand, the new leadership
either knew, or came to acknowledge, the dangers of excessive reform.
Characteristic of the Khrushchev period were repeated swings in official
policy, as the new leadership attempted to maintain a tense balance
between enthusiasm for discarding the past, and uncontrolled iconoclasm,
between mobilizing the energy of ‘new forces’, and giving in to anarchy,
between maintaining the Soviet system, and causing its implosion.4
Yet to recount only the swings in official policy is to simplify the
complex, shifting social context to which these reforms were directed, and
within which they were received, discussed, and reinterpreted. The essays
in this volume examine not only the dilemmas of reform, as negotiated in
the sphere of high politics, but also the reception of these policies by the
Soviet public, comparing the ‘reform agenda’ of the Soviet leadership with
that of the Soviet population. These case studies demonstrate that the zeal
for reform on the part of the Soviet leadership – which was itself far from
2 Polly Jones
consistent – sometimes corresponded to that of the Soviet public, whilst at
other times it responded to desires for change emanating from ‘below’,
whether by encouraging or suppressing them. At the same time, the essays
here demonstrate that the Soviet population was riven by its own dilem-
mas of de-Stalinization: the mentalité of post-Stalinism was an unstable
compound of conservatism and radicalism, and ‘friends’ of reform within
society could easily transform into its ‘foes’.5 The Stalin cult and the men-
tality of demonization and denunciation characteristic of the Terror were
just two aspects of the Stalinist habitus which lived on into the Khrushchev
era.6

Defining de-Stalinization
The term ‘de-Stalinization’ (destalinizatsiia) never appeared in the public
rhetoric of the Khrushchev era. Instead, the process of raking over the
Stalinist past, and especially the rejection of the Stalin cult, was designated
by the impersonal, purportedly objective expression, ‘the overcoming/
exposure of the cult of personality’ (preodolenie/razoblachenie kul’ta lich-
nosti).7 Although before the Secret Speech, there was no overt admission
that the ‘cult’ was linked to Stalin, after the revelations of the 20th Party
Congress, and especially after the second wave of revelations about Stalin
in the early 1960s, the cult of personality would often be attached specifi-
cally to Stalin’s name. This generalizing terminology aimed to maintain an
air of historical objectivity and impeccable Marxist credentials, whilst also
reducing Stalin’s semantic, and therefore political, dominance of the post-
Stalinist scene.8
At the same time, however, the closest equivalent of ‘de-Stalinization’
in the contemporary political lexicon was most often used in the Soviet
context to denote a fairly narrow process: the de-mythologization of the
leader cult. Gradually, the elliptical expression ‘the era of the cult of
personality’ came to substitute for, and in some senses to curtail, a deeper
exposition of the complex ramifications of Stalin’s authoritarian regime.9
When reforming state policies such as citizen welfare, the new authorities
did not generally refer specifically to Stalin or the cult as the reason for
previous delays in such long-needed reforms. Nevertheless, the authorities
strongly emphasized the novelty of those reforms, clearly indicating their
eagerness to dissociate themselves and their policies from the past and to
rejuvenate the Soviet system. Recent archival materials make it clear that
strong criticism of Stalin(ism) featured much more frequently in discus-
sions behind closed doors, especially in Khrushchev’s speeches at Central
Committee presidium meetings and plenums, than in the public discourse
of the post-Stalin era.10
By contrast, the term ‘de-Stalinization’ has appeared widely in post-
Soviet Russian and Western journalism and scholarship, and in this
context it has possessed a wider range of connotations. Often, and espe-
 Introduction 3
cially during the Khrushchev era, it did signify the direct criticisms of
Stalin made during the series of revelations instigated by the Secret
Speech.11 Here the emphasis on Stalin was usually intended as a corrective
to Soviet attempts to ‘objectify’ what was in reality a highly subjective, ad
hominem attack on the former leader. The persistence with which Western
political and scholarly commentators dissected ‘de-Stalinization’ also
sought to focus the debate on Stalinism, and on the systemic enquiry
which domestic commentators were forced to avoid, or, if they had
mistakenly strayed into it, to disavow.12 The primary meaning of ‘de-
Stalinization’, and its opposite, ‘re-Stalinization’, therefore remains the
process of historical revisionism which deconstructed the Stalin cult.
Historical revisionism is crucial to our understanding of the period, not
least because the debunking of Stalin’s authority was a prerequisite for re-
thinking a whole range of Stalinist priorities and practices in other
domains. Accordingly, many chapters here are directly or indirectly con-
cerned with the modifications of Stalin’s image, and especially the signific-
ance of major junctures in the ‘anti-Stalin campaign’, such as Khrushchev’s
Secret Speech (1956), in advancing or retracting waves of reform.
However, ‘de-Stalinization’ has also come to denote more diffuse
processes of revision and reform, and these secondary implications are
also important to our approach. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
there have appeared studies of the ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Soviet armed
forces, labour relations, the Soviet consumer, design and architecture and
criminal justice, amongst other topics.13 The heterogeneity of these fields
suggests that an equally heterogeneous definition of de-Stalinization must
be sought. Without seeking to simplify these case studies, they suggest that
important real or imagined elements of de-Stalinization included liberal-
ization of the authoritarian political culture of Stalinism, a greater
emphasis on individual welfare and material well-being, ‘Thaw(s)’ of the
Stalinist freeze on freedom of expression, and modifications to the autar-
kic chauvinism especially characteristic of Cold War Stalinism. This is not
to suggest that all, or any, of these aims were achieved during the period,
but they were important landmarks in the discursive territory on to which
post-Stalinism was mapped in public rhetoric and debates of the time.
Of course, the term ‘de-Stalinization’ is potentially problematic when
applied to processes not directly linked to the figure of Stalin. How much
change has to be desired, or achieved, before it constitutes de-
Stalinization, and when does change stop being evolutionary, and become
revolutionary? Can we deem a process ‘de-Stalinization’ if the desire to
break with Stalin(ism) is not explicitly articulated? Or, lastly, if a policy
claims to constitute de-Stalinization, do the outcomes, which might well
end up still being ‘Stalinist’, matter? In exploring the reforms of the
Khrushchev era, we must remain aware of the rhetorical constructions of
‘Stalinism’ and ‘post-Stalinism’ (or ‘anti-Stalinism’) on which they often,
tendentiously relied.
4 Polly Jones
The following chapters seek to convey the very real problems that the
new leaders inherited after March 1953. They also explore the multifarious
dilemmas which attended every stage of the subsequent reform process,
from defining these problems (and who or what might be to blame,
whether Stalin, his cronies, or the very nature of the Soviet system), to
trying to solve them, to defining the limits of change. These dilemmas, like
the term ‘de-Stalinization’ itself, and its homonyms, such as ‘Thaw’
(ottepel’), were complex and plagued with indeterminacy. However, in our
view, this indeterminacy reflects well the difficulty of measuring or delimit-
ing the enormous impact of Stalin’s death, and the depth and breadth of its
ramifications into Soviet life. Accordingly, this study does not seek unduly
to limit the meaning(s) of ‘de-Stalinization’, and in so doing, seeks instead
to convey the manifold uncertainties and hesitations of this turbulent time,
in which the very ideas of stability, control and authority were thrown into
question.
This volume does not cover all of the reforms of the Khrushchev era;
studies of the content of Khrushchev-era policies already exist, although
doubtless these too will continue to be modified by the ongoing, accelerat-
ing, stream of archival materials from the fondy of the Central Committee
and Khrushchev himself.14 The personality of Khrushchev, his leadership
struggles with his Central Committee rivals, and similar Kremlinological
questions are not considered at length here. Despite the relative paucity of
archival information and the unreliability of many available sources about
these topics, such questions have long dominated studies of the era, and
continue to do so in much post-Soviet scholarship.15 Clearly in a one-party
system, with inherent tendencies toward producing leader cults, the role of
the Central Committee and the personality of Khrushchev himself should
not be understated.16 However, elite negotiations of party policy tell us
only one part of a more complex story.
The present volume instead focuses on topics which have been under-
represented in studies of post-Stalinism, despite the superior provision of
‘lower-level’ sources: the social and cultural history of the reform process,
its impact on Soviet people, and their impact on it. In presenting a series of
case studies of the social and cultural aspects of de-Stalinization, we have
mostly excluded areas of policy whose implementation did not directly
affect the Soviet population, such as foreign policy.17 At the same time, for
reasons of space, this volume does not cover in detail some important
domains in which de-Stalinization exerted a significant impact, notably
agriculture,18 film19 and gender.20 However, through presenting a selection
of case studies of some of the most important aspects of de-Stalinization,
where the Stalinist past was most clearly at issue, amongst them the anti-
Stalin campaign, the renunciation of Terror, the increased attention to
individual welfare, and the ‘Thaw’ in Soviet culture, we focus on the
dynamics of the reform process, in order to develop a new framework for
our understanding of social and cultural change in the Khrushchev era.
 Introduction 5
The studies here urge us not to reduce the dynamics of de-Stalinization
to either a bottom-up, or a top-down, explosion of reform, or even a series
of swings from left to right. Rather, they indicate that the cardinal
dilemma of de-Stalinization, and what remained the focus of negotiation
throughout the Khrushchev era, was the prerogative to direct and control
social and cultural change. This prerogative, which had belonged to Stalin
until his death, was disputed within the Central Committee, as it sought to
resolve the post-Stalin power struggle in its own midst. Even in its most
populist, radical moments, however, the party continued to believe in the
party’s unimpeachable authority over the people. This belief was usually
not matched, however, by a stable image of the rights, freedoms and duties
of the Soviet citizenry. This struggle for authority had its counterpart
outside the corridors of Soviet power, as the Soviet population grappled
with potential new forms of interaction between state and society, and
between individual citizens.
The present volume is divided into three parts – public opinion, identity
and style – which broadly reflect the primary focus of the chapters con-
tained within them, although every chapter to some extent considers all
three of these intertwined themes. The substance of these themes, and the
dilemmas of de-Stalinization which they elucidate, are described below.

Public opinion
Like many of the reforms of the Khrushchev era, changes to public
opinion came in many guises. Official visions of post-totalitarian channels
of communication between people and party – responsible criticism and
whistle-blowing directed toward the greater party good – did not often
coincide with the reality of a restive, and sometimes rebellious, popu-
lation. From the literature on dissent in the Khrushchev years, we know
that the curtailment of terror and the revelations about Stalin radically
changed the boundaries and forms of public opinion.21 These changes led
to the first emergence of dissidence (inakomyslie), and recurrent manifes-
tations of more widespread and violent social discontent, such as repeated
Gulag revolts (Kengir, Vorkuta) pro-Stalin demonstrations in Georgia
(1956) and the riots about food prices in Novocherkassk (1962).22
This emphasis on resistance and repression can, however, mask the fact
that the Soviet authorities’ commitment to opening up the public sphere
after Stalinism was genuine, and even radical. Although very diverse
popular responses to party policy did survive even in the most repressive
moments of the Stalin era, the quantity and quality of popular communica-
tion with the regime significantly increased in the post-Stalin era, due in
part to the ‘freer’ atmosphere often noted by foreign visitors, but due also
to specific appeals made in the new party rhetoric.23 Calls for criticism
‘from below’ (snizu) of, for example, despotic managers, negligent or
incompetent local party authorities, inadequate provision of consumer
6 Polly Jones
goods, unsatisfactory child-care and housing were a frequent feature of the
public rhetoric of the Khrushchev era.24 They served a variety of aims for
the leadership, from exposing the local defects of the economic and polit-
ical system, and perhaps hastening their rectification, to re-engaging
popular energies, and underscoring the new leadership’s commitment to
the people, its central claim to legitimacy. This populist appeal, one of the
most important changes from Stalinism, induced many more Soviet cit-
izens to write, or otherwise openly respond, to the authorities than had
dared to during the Stalin era.25 More of these criticisms found their way
on to the pages of the Soviet press, and even occasionally into the body of
policy documents, than previously, although vastly more remained unpub-
lished in the archives, and some still spurred aggressive investigations into
their authors.26
At the same time, as the chapters in Part I demonstrate, at many junc-
tures in the post-Stalin period, this optimism about public opinion trans-
formed into distrust, anxiety and pessimism about the reliability and
benevolence of the people (narod). Additionally, as well as proving to be
unreliable objects of the authorities’ experiments in de-Stalinizing public
opinion, Soviet citizens as subjects of de-Stalinization did not always
welcome the desired changes. As the chapters here make clear, the reluc-
tance to de-Stalinize was common to sectors of the Party authorities and
some sectors of the public whose responses indicated the persistence of
several key features of the Stalinist mind-set (even as they generally
exploited distinctively post-Stalinist norms of communicating with the
authorities).
Part I begins with Miriam Dobson’s study of one of the earliest
episodes of de-Stalinization, the amnesties for Gulag inmates declared in
1953, the year of Stalin’s death. Her study of the conflicts in public
opinion, and the uncertain discourse of rehabilitation which framed the
amnesties, suggest that de-Stalinization may not have been so readily wel-
comed by the Soviet population as is often thought. It also suggests an
uncertainty surrounding the de-Stalinization project from its very incep-
tion which, like the conflicts between popular conservatism and radicalism,
would not dissipate over subsequent years.
Following this case study of early de-Stalinization, other chapters in
Part I go on to explore the exceptionally turbulent response aroused by
more explicit forms of ‘de-Stalinization’, such as the overt criticisms of the
Secret Speech and subsequent anti-Stalin campaign. Polly Jones’ chapter
traces the evolution of public opinion over the course of the anti-Stalin
campaign, as both a real problem and imaginary category for the Soviet
authorities. Even the Secret Speech, (semi-)secret as its dissemination was,
contained some hopes for a docile reception amongst the Soviet populace.
The chapter describes how these hopes were dashed by the extraordinarily
diverse, and mostly undesirable, responses aroused by the speech. It then
goes on to examine the second wave of de-Stalinization, in 1961 and after,
 Introduction 7
in which the desirable forms of public opinion were not only more clearly
imagined, but also more effectively policed, by the authorities. In this
sense, the ‘success’ of de-Stalinization depended, paradoxically enough, as
much on containing potential forces of iconoclasm and disorder amongst
the population as it did on iconoclastic critiques of Stalin’s cult.
This is also shown in the case study by Susanne Schattenberg, whose
chapter illustrates how the discourse of the 20th Party Congress played out
in the space of the factory. Whilst, as in other places, the Secret Speech
evoked a wide variety of responses amongst workers, the curtailment of
discussions about Stalin did not lead to more exemplary responses. Even
more apparently benign discussions of the congress’ economic implications
featured harsh criticism by some workers, such as engineers, who
debunked the party’s propaganda about ‘democratic’ technical innovation
by describing the real difficulties faced by inventors. In this sense, as
Schattenberg points out, life began to imitate literature, in this case, the
less ‘orthodox’ aspects of Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, a novel con-
cerned with the struggle between innovators and the dead weight of Soviet
bureaucracy.
Part I concludes with Denis Kozlov’s more detailed study of Dudint-
sev’s text, which uses a vast corpus of readers’ letters concerning this
banner work of the Thaw to demonstrate some broader features of ‘Thaw
psychology’. Kozlov argues that Not by Bread Alone, which critiqued
many weaknesses and outright injustices of the Stalinist system, did not,
despite its publication in the liberal Novyi mir, evoke an entirely ‘de-
Stalinized’ reader response. Instead, readers’ discourse occupied a para-
doxical position between repudiation of Stalinism, including Terror, and
the perpetuation of a distinctively Stalinist mentality of social exclusion,
directed at the villainous bureaucrats of the novel.
Kozlov’s chapter serves as a suitably ambiguous conclusion to Part I, in
which de-Stalinization is shown to be a highly unstable, and de-stabilizing,
force in the Soviet public sphere. Not only were the Soviet authorities’
own discourses and policies of de-Stalinization extremely fragile and
prone to change, but popular sentiments for or against de-Stalinization did
not emerge as stable social cleavages in post-Stalinist society. As such, de-
Stalinization emerges as a process, and dialogue, rather than a finite policy
initiative. The negotiation, and sometimes competition, over the meanings
of de-Stalinization continued throughout the period. Indeed, these mul-
tiple fissures in public opinion may have been the most lasting legacy of
de-Stalinization.

De-Stalinizing the Stalinist self

In addition to these intended and unintended changes to public opinion,
de-Stalinization carried broader populist commitments; it meant renewed
attention to citizen welfare, shown, for instance, in the increased emphasis
8 Polly Jones
on consumerism,27 housing28 and more ‘democratic’ working practices.29
Each set of reforms was predicated on a negative view of Stalinism, in
order to emphasize the new regime’s legitimacy. In a broad sense, the
reforms often implicitly caricatured the Stalin era as neglectful of the indi-
vidual, and Stalinist society as a horde of faceless masses (in Stalin’s own
formulation, vintiki) ignored or abused by Stalin. The re-orientation of the
economy toward group B industries, for instance, implicitly cast the Stalin
era as neglectful of the consumer and the daily needs of individuals,
whereas the economic plans for the Khrushchev era insistently reiterated
its commitment to the ‘good of the people’ (blago naroda).30 Images of
housewarming (novosel’e) were one of the defining tropes of the Thaw,
suggesting a liberation from the overcrowded indignities of the communal
apartment, and the possibility of ‘making a home’ in spacious, modern sur-
roundings, with the new home serving as a metaphor for the more benign
post-Stalinist society.31 Lastly, the changes to worker welfare – including
higher pensions, better maternity provision, shorter working days, and a
more egalitarian shop-floor culture – pictured Stalinist managers, espe-
cially after the Secret Speech, as ‘mini-Stalins’ with their own cults of
personality, which had prevented them from letting workers have their
say, and blinded them to their welfare issues. These local misfortunes
stood, of course, as metonyms for the brutal Stalinist state as a whole.
Dilemmas attended each of these reforms, which bruited their commit-
ment to rescuing the Soviet citizen from Stalin’s dismissal of them as mere
screws in the larger state machine, but never resolved the issues of individ-
uation and privatization that they inevitably implied. Having dismissed the
cult of personality (kul’t lichnosti), the regime found it difficult to accept
the new Soviet individual (lichnost’) which emerged from its de-Stalinizing
reforms.
Christine Varga-Harris explores the paradoxes of post-Stalinist identity
formation in her study of housing policy during the Khrushchev era. On
the one hand, the shift to mass housing construction did represent a
radical break with foregoing policies, and doubtless improved the lot of
many thousands of individuals and families hitherto forced to live in com-
munal accommodation. On the other hand, the policy’s emphasis on quan-
tity, not quality, perpetuated many of the systemic failings of the Stalinist
economy. This raised popular expectations without fulfilling them, and
such failings in the Khrushchev era, as discussed above, provoked much
more vociferous and bold criticism than in the Stalin era. The uniquely
close connection between identity and home, emphasized in the rhetoric
of the time, spawned in letters about housing a new discourse in which a
new Soviet self gradually took shape. Citizenship, privacy and a more reci-
procal relationship between state and people were key concerns in these
communications, as letter writers actively engaged in re-shaping the offi-
cial rhetoric of de-Stalinization, investing it with their own meanings.
As with imagery of the home, popular appropriations of the new official
 Introduction 9
cache of identities also affected the workplace. As Susanne Schattenberg
and Donald Filtzer argue, the official discourse (and substantive policy
innovations) concerning worker rights provided a platform from which
workers could demand further freedoms. These could include the freedom
to propose economic and technical innovations over the heads of factory
bureaucrats (Schattenberg), or, more ominously for economic productiv-
ity, the freedom to move jobs, even though conditions on the shop floor
had improved since Stalin’s time (Filtzer).
The Soviet authorities were only too aware that its discourse of indi-
vidual identity might also appear to condone a retreat into the private
sphere, and disengagement from collective pursuits. An understandable,
although paradoxical, feature of ‘de-Stalinization’ which ran concurrently
with its emphasis on individual well-being and private freedoms was there-
fore a renewed attention to mobilizing the population to participate in
public initiatives and collective life.32 In practice, this often entailed intru-
sive violations of privacy at least the equal of any Stalin-era surveillance.33
The proposed reconciliation between a citizen contented in his private life
and engaged in publicly useful work, an ideal forcefully propagated in the
Third Party Program (1961), was supposed to result from an erasure of the
boundaries between public and private. Citizens were accordingly urged to
engage in all manner of collective pursuits just over – and ideally, beyond
– the threshold of their new private apartments, including beautifying
(blagoustroistvo) their neighbourhood and organizing leisure pursuits for
its inhabitants.34
In a broader sense, although the period saw massive reforms directed
specifically at the educational system, to allow the inculcation of socially
useful skills (especially production skills) and Soviet morality, the official
rhetoric increasingly imagined the whole of Soviet society as a ‘state
school’. This educative rhetoric, like so many tropes of the ‘Thaw’, was
Janus-faced. On the one hand, it imagined Soviet people, especially the
fresh-faced youngest generations, as perfectible. Within the prevalent dis-
course of upbringing (vospitanie), children were often optimistically
viewed as blank slates, on which the Soviet system could inscribe its ideal
characteristics.35 At the same time, as Ann Livschiz describes, when the
debate about children’s upbringing was re-opened in the freer post-
Stalinist context, it revealed the staggering scale of child immorality and
juvenile delinquency, problems which only persisted and even increased in
the Khrushchev era, defying the utopian hopes of reformers. Similarly, as
Juliane Fürst argues, youth, another key trope in the rhetoric of the time,
and a central focus of many policies, including the nurturing of young
artists (see Lygo) and the Virgin Lands campaign, proved in reality to be,
at best, a disappointment, and at worst, a major concern for the party
authorities. Alternative youth cultures and high rates of juvenile delin-
quency had generated problems in the Stalin era, and they only worsened
within the post-Stalinist context of greater leniency in criminal justice, and
10 Polly Jones
increased exposure to Western (youth) culture. Accordingly, both children
and youth peopled the new Soviet imagination as ideal bearers of
communism, yet also as incorrigible wrong-doers, resistant to propaganda
and a threat to the socialist project. Similar ambiguity surrounded the
older generations, who could be – in reality and rhetoric alike – dangerous
remnants of the past (perezhitki proshlogo) with bad habits (including
poor parenting), which might nevertheless be ‘liquidated’ using the correct
propaganda.36
The prominence of vospitanie in the party’s dealings with all genera-
tions, especially in the 1960s, with the introduction of the new Party
Program, indicated that post-Stalinism would not dispense with the moral
interventionism characteristic of Stalinism.37 At the same time, the period
saw, as Livschiz and Fürst argue, greater defiance of the party-state’s enti-
tlement to subject its young citizens to vospitanie. This might partially
explain the new legislation on parasitism and hooliganism, which was
introduced at the same time as the optimistic party program, as Miriam
Dobson describes in her chapter.
In the early 1960s, and arguably throughout the entire Khrushchev era,
party discourse was caught between optimism about the headlong rush
into communism and excoriation of the persistent forces of backwardness
which held the party back from reaching its ultimate goal. This ambiguous
discourse, and the contradictory impulses toward persuasion and coercion
in party policy, indicated that a sense of pessimism about human nature,
and quasi-Stalinist methods of enforcing (rather than merely inculcating)
Soviet morality, still underlay the path to the glorious future.

De-Stalinization and style

Peripheral as it may seem to the welter of pressing socio-economic prob-
lems which faced the Soviet leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, the ques-
tion of style was in fact central to the party’s search for legitimacy in the
post-Stalin era. One of the principal and most public dilemmas of de-
Stalinization was how to revitalize Soviet culture, to make it a relevant and
exciting means of communication between party and people, replacing the
dogmatic, repetitive and patently idealized propaganda of the Stalin era.
At the same time, the quest for a new de-Stalinized style – one that was
variously coded as more ‘sincere’, ‘truthful’, ‘lively’, ‘inspiring’ or, some-
times, simply ‘stylish’ – took many forms, and involved many different
interpretations of the parameters of the new style, and indeed the para-
meters of freedom of expression, which collided over the course of the
decade.38 In the debates over ‘style’, the stakes were high: these negotia-
tions raised questions about party prerogatives in culture, the nature of the
socialist project and its guiding ideology (and the appropriate forms, if
any, of Socialist Realism), and, fundamentally, the possibility of ‘truth’ and
freedom of expression in a one-party state. Although the Khrushchev era
 Introduction 11
has traditionally been identified as a time of ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’) which helped
to defrost the static and soulless culture of the Stalin era, it is more apt to
speak of several ‘Thaws’, of varying origin, duration and temperature.39
The origins of the ‘Thaws’, it is argued here, lay not only in the long-
suppressed desires of writers, artists and teachers for greater creative
expression, but also in the overt encouragement of stylistic reform – albeit
within strict limits – by the highest party authorities in the immediate
aftermath of Stalin’s death. This was evident in the earliest moves against
the cult in the media and against ‘varnishing of reality’ (lakirovka) in art,
the deliberate fostering of youthful creativity by the cultural authorities, as
a counterweight to the conservative Stalin-era cultural bureaucrats (see
Lygo and Reid), and public exhortations, especially in 1956 and after, to
the cowed historical profession to cast off the shackles of Stalinist dogma,
such as the paradigm set by the Short Course (see Markwick).
Whilst the party’s definition of the Stalin cult was notoriously opaque,
the kul’t lichnosti was consistently blamed for suppressing debate, both aca-
demic (especially in the social sciences) and more broadly public, as well as
for encouraging a dogmatic acceptance of Stalinist thinking (nachetnich-
estvo).40 Ideally, the cultural intelligentsia, grateful for the party’s partial
lifting of restrictions on censorship, was to spearhead a union-wide discus-
sion of the drawbacks of Stalinism, revealing some harsh truths about the
past and pinpointing areas for improvement in the present. Additionally,
and more importantly, they were to move on from this episode of retro-
spection and begin to create heroic new Soviet myths, drawing on the best
traditions of the past and the stunning achievements of the present.
Predictably, the party’s faith in the goodwill (construed as political obe-
dience) of the creative intelligentsia waxed and waned over the course of
this turbulent decade, in part due to Khrushchev’s own unsophisticated
and inconsistent views on culture.41 It is also true, as the authors here
argue, that the party’s modest hopes for controlled liberalization were
more often than not confounded by daring attempts ‘from below’ at revi-
sionism, iconoclasm and what the party termed ‘anti-Soviet’ radicalism,
such as the defiance of party controls over culture.42 However, for all that,
it would be a mistake to discount the role of ‘top-down’ forces in instigat-
ing cultural de-Stalinization after Stalin’s death.
The duration and temperature of the various Thaws, as well as of the
freezes punctuating them, can also only be determined if we take both offi-
cial policy and unofficial practices into account. Most of the chapters here
concur that the end of the Khrushchev era did mark a decisive shift away
from liberalism, however restricted these partial freedoms may have been.
On the other hand, from several chapters, including those by Lygo, Reid
and Markwick, it is apparent that trends toward a harder line in culture
can be discerned much earlier in the period. Cultural policy was punctu-
ated by a number of pendulum shifts, notably the upsurge of liberalization
in 1956 (after the 20th Party Congress) and 1961–62 (the 22nd Party
12 Polly Jones
Congress and its aftermath), and its decline in late 1954–55, late 1956–57,
and 1963. However, a much harder freeze does appear to have set in as
early as late 1962, resulting in the trial of Iosif Brodskii, the Manège affair,
the ideological plenum of summer 1963, and a continued hardening of the
stance on hooliganism and parasitism.43
This problematic, tortuous chronology suggests that we should not view
the Khrushchev era as exceptional, much less unique, in the history of cul-
tural policy. Khrushchev himself was no liberal in matters of culture, and
the Soviet cultural apparatus – the interlocking system of censorship,
unions and patronage which had taken form in the Stalin era – remained
unscathed by de-Stalinization. Although numerous ‘children of the 20th
congress’ have in retrospect considered the Khrushchev era a halcyon
period of relative freedom, the essays here argue that there was no consis-
tent commitment to liberalization on the part of the authorities, nor even
within the various cultural communities, where the conservative opposi-
tion to de-Stalinization remained formidable.44 Rather, the ‘Thaw’ and
substantive ‘de-Stalinization’ took place, against fierce opposition, only
within certain sectors of the cultural community, many of which were
forced underground even before the end of the Khrushchev era.
Rather than recounting the successful implementation of de-
Stalinization, therefore, the chapters in Part III document instead a
growing diversity of forms of de-Stalinization, which grew out of the initial
impetus to dissociate from the Stalinist stylistic and cultural heritage. As
Roger Markwick argues, for instance, de-Stalinization portended many
changes to the historical profession, from the re-thinking of the profes-
sional identity of the historian (a generally agreed prerequisite to revision-
ism) to the re-thinking of the Stalinist past (useful to the party within
limits), and sometimes the entire post-revolutionary era (emphatically off
limits). The commitment to one or other of these forms of revisionism
tended to deepen the divisions between ‘official’ historians, and those who
would gradually emerge as dissident, samizdat history writers. A nascent
dissident culture is also foreshadowed in the conclusion to Emily Lygo’s
examination of the short-lived concordat between young writers and the
party-state, whose curtailment propelled many former ‘young hopes’ more
firmly into ‘alternative’ creative activities. Even the ‘old guard’ of writers
examined by Katharine Hodgson, who might have been more reliable
companions along the path to de-Stalinization, often transgressed official
limits in their meditations on the Stalinist past; many of their thoughtful
attempts to de-Stalinize their own memories and artistic identities were
not published, and this, again, abetted the emergence of an alternative
‘culture of de-Stalinization’.45 This culture of samizdat and unofficial
groupings, which started to probe the deeper systemic problems side-
stepped by official narratives of de-Stalinization, was a significant force in
the dissident movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, re-grouping to
oppose ‘re-Stalinization’ under Brezhnev, for example.46
 Introduction 13
What, then, prevented the party from accepting this more coherent
culture of de-Stalinization? All the chapters here indicate that ‘party-
mindedness’, or the centrality of socialist ideology, remained the fulcrum
of party policy throughout the period. Michael Froggatt’s chapter on the
culture of science illustrates the ways in which the liberalizing tendencies
of de-Stalinization were consistently tempered by the intense ideological
tenor, even utopianism, of the Khrushchev years. Whilst science undoubt-
edly became more ‘open-minded’ in the period, re-thinking some Stalinist
and Lysenkoist dogma and accepting some Western influences, it con-
tinued to be the handmaiden of ideology, providing the materialist foun-
dation for intensified anti-religious campaigns in the education system and
wider Soviet society. Meanwhile, whilst the literary, artistic and historio-
graphical communities were encouraged to slough off the dead hand of
Stalinism, dispensing with dogma, cant and ‘varnishing of reality’, it was
clear that Socialist Realism and ‘party mindedness’ (partiinost’) were to be
preserved and even strengthened as guiding principles.
The period saw some genuine debate about the forms of Socialist
Realism, in which reflections on the ‘new style’ for the self-proclaimed ‘new
era’ were not only allowed, but also encouraged. Susan Reid shows that,
despite the deep divisions within the artistic community between conserva-
tives and radicals, there was some consensus on the need to create a rejuve-
nated style to reflect the achievements of the revolutionary present. There
were concurrent debates in other cultural forums about narratives and
images which might best reflect the optimism and heroism of the surge
toward communism heralded by the Third Party Programme (1961).47
However, radical revisionism was not to be countenanced, whether in the
form of interest in Western modernism (Reid), interrogations of the origins
of the Soviet system, including the revolution of 1917 (Markwick), exces-
sively personal poetry (Lygo, Hodgson) or, indeed, any tendency which the
Central Committee might deem to fall outside the bounds of Socialist
Realism. For, ill-defined as Socialist Realism remained,48 at no time in this
period did the party relinquish its prerogatives to define what it was, and
was not. In this lay one of the principal continuities with the Stalin era.

Conclusion
Viewed through the prism of the ‘re-Stalinization’ which succeeded it, the
‘de-Stalinization’ of the Khrushchev era appears exceptional, an anom-
alous and unique episode in Soviet history. Certainly, looking for prece-
dents for glasnost’ and perestroika, the intelligentsia and party in the
Gorbachev years concurred in their praise for the bold reforms of the
Khrushchev years.49 Yet how bold were these changes? And to what
extent can they be attributed to Khrushchev and his regime?
The reforms to criminal justice, especially the amnesties, and
the debunking of the Stalin cult in the Secret Speech stand as lasting
14 Polly Jones
achievements of the period, for they ensured that full re-Stalinization – of
the Gulag, and of the Stalin cult – would never again be possible. Despite
the party’s best efforts in the latter years of the Khrushchev era, the
‘Thaw’ in culture and the de-Stalinization of the public sphere would also
exert a lasting influence; never again could state–society relations be
meaningfully described as totalitarian, and the freedoms which sectors of
the intelligentsia tasted in the 1950s and early 1960s were transferred into
dissident culture, where they continued to present a serious challenge into
the Brezhnev era. Arguably, in a wider sense, the shift from the aggres-
sively public culture of the Stalin era to the more ‘normal’ privacy of the
Khrushchev years inadvertently initiated the ‘privatization’ and even de-
ideologization of Soviet culture which would continue into late socialism.
In view of the real and potential dangers of ‘de-Sovietizing’ the system,
the dilemmas of de-Stalinization did not therefore end with the renunci-
ation of the coercive mechanisms of the Stalin era. Indeed, these initial
reforms threw up more questions than they answered. What, now, would
ensure popular participation in the efforts to boost economic productivity,
arguably the central goal of these reforms? Would mobilization, based on
persuasion and enthusiasm, be a sound basis for economic success and
social control? And where did the limits to iconoclasm and liberalization
lie? These were profound dilemmas, deepened by the party’s unchanged
commitment to the strengthening of the Soviet system. They led to the
paradoxical combinations of liberalism and conservatism, iconoclasm and
preservation of Stalinist norms in party policy which the chapters here
delineate. These paradoxes were mirrored in the uncertainty which
gripped the Soviet population, as it held its own debates about the Stalin
cult, terror, post-Stalinist identity and the post-Stalinist system, unsure of
the limits of discussion, and of the uncertain answers which emerged.
Therefore, although 1953 undoubtedly constituted a pivotal moment,
the paradoxical outcomes of de-Stalinization problematize the very idea of
a turning point. Much post-Stalinist change had its origins in pressures that
had accumulated before 1953, and it all too often perpetuated the values
and practices of that earlier time. ‘De-Stalinization’ was improvised from a
mixture of old and new mentalities and policies, belying the sense of final-
ity implied in both the Russian and English renderings of the term. In this
sense, the idea of ‘Thaw’ might better capture the fragility, the potential
for reversal (or ‘freeze’), which each tentative forward step carried. Both
terms appear in the chapters which follow; let us now turn to their detailed
exposition of the dilemmas of de-Stalinization.

Notes
1 On the Stalin cult as a form of legitimization, see B. Apor, J. Behrends, P.
Jones and A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin
and the Eastern Bloc, London: Palgrave, 2004, esp. chapters by Benno Ennker
and Jan Behrends; c.f. J. Brooks, Thank you Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public
 Introduction 15
Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000.
2 E.g. Y. Gorlizki, ‘Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin’, Slavic Review, vol.
54, no. 1, 1995, 1–22; M. Zezina, ‘Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers in the
early 1950s’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 1994, 649–61.
3 See, for example, Ibid.; E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and
Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. H. Ragdale, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe,
1998; D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
4 For the fullest account of these ‘schizophrenic’ swings, which links them to
Khrushchev’s own manic depressive personality, see W. Taubman, Khrushchev.
The Man and His Era, New York: W. Norton, 2003.
5 S. Cohen, ‘The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in
the Soviet Union’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet (eds), The
Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
6 On the mentality of Stalinism, see Brooks, Thank you Comrade Stalin! and Kh.
Kobo (ed.), Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina, Moscow, 1989, passim.; On the syncretic
post-Stalinist mentality, see M. Dobson, ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular
Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation 1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University
of London, 2003.
7 The term appeared in the title of the Secret Speech itself, O kul’te lichnosti
i ego posledstviiakh (‘On the cult of personality and its consequences’) and
in the July 1956 resolution, O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii (‘On
the overcoming of the cult of personality and its consequences’), as well as
in the period preceding the Secret Speech, where the idea of the ‘kul’t lichnosti’
appeared frequently in the press, without being linked to Stalin (on early
impersonal criticism of the cult, see R. Conquest, Power and Policy in the
USSR, London, 1961, p. 278).
8 On the vagueness of the term ‘kul’t’, see L. Maksimenkov, ‘Kul’t. Zametki o
slovakh-simvolakh v sovetskoi politicheskoi kul’ture’, Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 10,
1993, 26–44.
9 E.g. ‘Leninskie normy – osnova partiinoi zhizni’, Pravda, 18 August 1961, p. 4;
‘K predstoiashemu izdaniiu mnogotomnoi istorii KPSS’, Pravda, 22 June 1962,
pp. 3–4, 24 June 1962, pp. 2–3; ‘Geroicheskii put’ Leninskoi partii. Vtoroe
izdanie uchebnika “Istoriia KPSS” ’, Pravda, 15 November 1962, p. 2; ‘Torzh-
estvo Leninskikh printsipov’, 29 November 1961, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov. Il’icheva’,
Pravda, 19 June 1963, p. 2.
10 E.g. Prezidiium TsK, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, pp. 399–400, 470, 512, 605,
634–6, 799. The descriptions of Stalin, and Stalin’s time, are invariably deroga-
tory, implying amongst other things that Stalin underwent a marked mental
deterioration during the latter half of his rule.
11 R. Tucker, ‘The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization’, in Id., The Soviet Political
Mind. Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed., New York: W. Norton, 1971,
pp. 173–202; H. Achminow, ‘A Decade of de-Stalinization’, Studies on the
Soviet Union, vol. 5, no. 3, 1965, 11–20.
12 For an overview of these foreign interpretations of de-Stalinization, see E.
Zolina, ‘Destalinizatsiia v SSSR v otsenkakh politologov’, Mezhdunarodnaia
zhizn’, no. 7, 1993, 138–44.
13 Iu. Abramova, ‘Destalinizatsiia sovetskogo obshchestva i vooruzhennye sily v
1953–1964 gg.’, in V.S. Lelchuk, G.Sh. Sagatelian (eds), Sovetskoe obshchestvo:
budni kholodnoi voiny. Materialy ‘kruglogo stola’, Institut Rossiiskoi istorii.
RAN 29 Marta 2000 g., Moscow-Arzamas: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000,
pp. 203–20; S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization
of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review vol.
16 Polly Jones
61, no. 2, 2002, 211–52; D. Filtzer, The Khrushchev era: De-Stalinization and the
Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–64, London: Macmillan, 1993; Id., Soviet
Workers and De-Stalinization. The consolidation of the modern system of Soviet
production relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992;
A. Van Goudoever, tr. F. Hijkoop, The Limits of DeStalinization in the Soviet
Union: Political Rehabilitations in the Soviet Union since Stalin, London: Croom
Helm, 1986.
14 Earlier accounts in e.g. E. Crankshaw, Khrushchev’s Russia London: Penguin,
1962; R. Medvedev, Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev. The Years in Power, New
York: W. Norton, 1978; M. McCauley, Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Archivally based accounts
include A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev, W. Taubman (eds), Nikita Khrushchev,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststal-
iniskoe obshchestvo: problemy liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow: Nauch-
naia kniga, 1999; Taubman, Khrushchev. Document collections include
Prezidiium Tsk; Istochnik, esp. no. 6, 2004; Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich
1957. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1998; Reabilitatsiia. Kak
eto bylo. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003.
15 Contemporary ‘Kremlinological’ accounts include Conquest, Power and Policy;
C. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–64, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1980. More recent studies include Iu. Aksiutin (ed.), Nikita
Sergeevich Khrushchev. Materialy k biografii, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politich-
eskoi literatury, 1989; R. Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz. Istoriia vlasti, Moscow:
RAGS, 1998; V. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N.S. Khrushcheva na
XX s’’ezde KPSS’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 4, 1996, 147–68.
16 Taubman, Khrushchev.
17 Although, of course, increased international contacts, due to tourism and
events such as the Moscow Youth Festival, certainly helped to internationalize
the Soviet mind-set, see e.g. K. Roth-Ey, ‘ “Loose” girls on the loose?: Sex, pro-
paganda and the 1957 youth festival’, in M. Ilic, S. Reid, L. Attwood (eds),
Women in the Khrushchev era, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, pp. 75–95.
18 On agriculture, see I.E. Zelinin, Agrarnaia politika N.S. Khrushcheva i sel’skoe
khoziaistvo, Moscow: RAN, 2001; A. Strelianyi, ‘Khrushchev and the Country-
side’, in Gleason, Khrushchev, Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev; M. Pohl, ‘Women
and Girls in the Virgin Lands’, in Ilic, Reid, Attwood (eds), Women in the
Khrushchev Era, pp. 52–74.
19 See J. Woll, Real Images. Soviet Cinema and the Thaw, London: Tauris, 2000.
20 See Ilic, Reid, Attwood (eds), Women in The Khruschev Era.
21 On public opinion, see e.g. B. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov
obshchestvennogo mneniia: epokha Khrushcheva, Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia,
2001; Iu. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel’’ i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v
SSSR v 1953–1964 gg., Moscow: Rosspen, 2004; c.f. M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev,
V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess dvadt-
satogo stoletiia Moscow: Rosspen, 1995.
22 On dissent, see Ibid., and E. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine
Stories About Disobedient Russians, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; L. Alexeyeva,
The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin era, Pittsburgh: Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 1993; V. Kozlov, Massovye bezporiadki v SSSR pri
Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953-nachalo 1980), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khrono-
graf, 1999; A. Applebaum, Gulag. A History, New York: Penguin, 2003, pp.
435–76; V. Kozlov, S. Mironenko (eds), 58–10. Nadzornye proizvodstva Proku-
ratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagandy. Mart 1953–1991,
Moscow: Mezhdunarodnaia fond ‘demokratiia’, 1999.
23 On public opinion in the Stalin era, see e.g. S. Davies, Popular Opinion in
 Introduction 17
Stalin’s Russia, Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997; L. Viola, Contending with Stalinism. Soviet
Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002; eyewitness accounts of the Khrushchev years include H. Salisbury,
Moscow Journal: The End of Stalin, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961; L
Fischer, Russia Revisited, London: Jonathan Cape, 1957; On the post-totalitar-
ian mindset and atmosphere, c.f. L. Brusilovskaia, ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v
epokhu “ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestevennye nauki i sovremen-
nost’, no. 1, 2000, 163–74.
24 E.g. ‘Pis’ma chitatelei’, Pravda, 3 February 1961, p. 3, ‘Za pis’mom – chelovek’,
Pravda, 22 March 1961, p. 1; ‘Chitatel’skie razdumiia: rastet u menia syn’,
Pravda, 27 February 1963, p. 4.
25 S. Bittner, ‘Local Soviets, Public Order and Welfare After Stalin: Appeals from
Moscow’s Kiev Raion’, Russian Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2003, 281–93; C. Kelly,
‘Retreat from Dogmatism. Populism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev’, in C.
Kelly, D. Shepherd (eds), Russian Cultural Studies. An Introduction, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 249–73.
26 Where letters were anonymous and/or harshly critical of Soviet power, investi-
gations were assiduous e.g. RGANI 5/34/2/47-53; RGANI 5/30/140/161-70.
27 Reid, ‘Cold War in the kitchen’.
28 E.g. S. Harris, ‘Recreating Everyday Life: Building, Distributing, Furnishing
and Living in the Separate Apartment in Soviet Russia, 1950s–1960s’, PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2003.
29 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization.
30 Very prevalent; a few examples are Ogonek, no. 44, 1955, p. 2; ‘Kommunistich-
eskii put’ pod’’ema narodnogo khoziaistva’, Pravda, 22 November 1961, p. 4;
‘Dlia blaga cheloveka’, Pravda, 27 October 1962, p. 2; ‘Dlia blaga naroda’,
Pravda, 4 November 1963, p. 1.
31 E.g. Ogonek, no. 49, 1954, p. 1; Ogonek, no. 52, 1961, p. 2.
32 See D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-
Stalinist Russia, 1953–64’, PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996.
33 As argued in V. Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism, and the fight against petit-
bourgeois consciousness in the Soviet home’, Journal of Design History, 1997,
vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, 161–76; O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and The Individual
in Russia: A Study of Practices, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999,
pp. 279–328.
34 C. Varga-Harris, ‘ “At Home as at Work”: Popular Initiative and the Revival of
Socialism in Russia under Khrushchev’, unpublished MS, paper delivered to
the 35th Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Slavic Studies, Toronto, 2003.
35 ‘Pochemu nado vospityvat’ detei s pervykh let zhizni’, Doshkol’noe vospitanie,
1960, no. 2, 10–14; ‘Rabota vospitatelia s det’mi rannego vozrasta’, Doshkol’-
noe vospitanie, 1960, no. 10, 15–20; ‘Vospityvat’ cheloveka budushchego’,
Doshkol’noe vospitanie, 1961, no. 10, 8–12; emphasis on co-ordinated efforts by
school and family was very common in the specialist and non-specialist press,
e.g. ‘Uchitel’ i sem’ia’, Pravda, 3 December 1962, p. 3.
36 ‘Plenum TsK VLKSM’, Pravda, 28 February 1957, p. 2; ‘Vospitanie chuvstv. Iz
zapisnoi knizhki pisatelia’, Pravda, 12 November 1961, p. 6; ‘Partiinaia organi-
zatsiia i shkola’, Pravda, 11 June 1962, p. 2.
37 Examples of vospitanie of all generations: ‘Vospityvat’ liubov’ i uvazhenie k
trudu’, Pravda, 29 August 1963, p. 1; ‘rech’ idet o vospitanii cheloveka’, Pravda,
23 September 1957, p. 4; ‘uchit’ i vospityvat’’, Pravda, 17 June 1961, p. 2; ‘vospi-
tyvat’ novogo cheloveka’, Pravda, 15 September, 1961 p. 3; ‘moral’nyi kodeks
strotelia kommunizma’, Pravda, 24 September 1961, p. 1.; ‘Zhizn’, kollektiv –
18 Polly Jones
luchshie vospitateli’, Pravda, 11 January 1963; ‘vospityvat’ aktivnykh bortsov za
kommunizm’, Pravda, 8 June 1963, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov Il’icheva’.
38 On sincerity and truth, see V. Pomerantsev, ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, Novyi
mir, 1953, no. 12, 218–45. The concern that propaganda should be lively and
inspiring was reflected in recurrent calls to overcome the ‘divorce from reality’
(otryv ot zhizni) supposedly typical of Stalin-era propaganda and education at
the 20th Congress (see Iu. Aksiutin, O. Volobuev, XX s’ezd KPSS: novatsii i
dogmy, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991) and in the press,
e.g. ‘Nazrevshie voprosy narodnogo obrazovaniia’, Pravda, 6 September 1958,
p. 2, ‘Samoe vazhnoe, samoe glavnoe v vospitanii novogo cheloveka’, Pravda,
15 April 1964, pp. 2–3. On ‘style’ as an important category in the era, see e.g. L.
Brusilovskaia, Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu ‘ottepeli’: metamorfozy stilia,
Moscow: URAO, 2001.
39 Ottepel’. Stranitsy russkoi sovetskoi literatury, 3 vols, Moscow: Moskovskii
rabochii, 1989–90; Alexeyeva, Goldberg, Thaw Generation; A. Pyzhikov,
Khrushchevskaia ottepel’, 1953–1964, Moscow: ‘Olma-Press’, 2002. C.f.
Vladimir Bukovsky’s cynicism about the extent of liberalization (V. Bukovsky,
To Build a Castle. My Life as a Dissenter, New York: Viking, pp. 108–13).
40 E.g. Pravda, 4 February 1962, p. 3; Pravda, 20 June 1963, p. 3.
41 See H. Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR 1946–59, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962; P. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: the
Politics of Soviet Culture, 1963–64, Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965; G.
Gibian, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw, 1954–1957,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960; M. Zezina, Sovetskaia
kudozhestvennaia intelligentsia i vlast’ v 1950–60-e gody, Moscow: Dialog
MGU, 1999; V. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva: dnevnik i poput-
noe (1953–1964), Moscow: izdatel’stvo ‘knizhnaia palata’, 1991.
42 Reabilitasiia, pp. 208–14; Pravda, 19–22 June 1963.
43 Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 589–602.
44 On the mythology propagated by the ‘children of the 20th Congress’, see e.g. N.
Barsukov, ‘Kak sozdavalsia zakrytyi doklad Khrushcheva’, Literaturnaia
gazeta, 21 February 1996, pp. 1–2. Documents released from the creative
unions and from party cultural bodies document these fights within cultural
communities, and between artists and party, e.g. Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do
Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS, Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva.
Ideologicheskie kommissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964. Dokumenty, Moscow:
Rosspen, 1998. C.f. Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia.
45 C.f. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 111, where he alleges that ‘there was a
Thaw and a melting at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, only it
took place not because of Khrushchev and not at the top, but in the hearts and
minds of ordinary people’.
46 See Alexeyeva, Thaw Generation; c.f. Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2, pp. 485–8, 491–3,
505–15.
47 E.g. ‘geroi nashikh dnei – geroi literatury i iskusstva’, Pravda, 2 April 1961, p. 1.
48 On the indeterminacy of Socialist Realism see e.g. K. Clark, The Soviet Novel.
History as Ritual, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; R. Robin, Social-
ist Realism. An Impossible Aesthetic, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
49 Aksiutin, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.
Part I
Responses to the
Thaw(s)
De-Stalinization and public
opinion
1 ‘Show the bandit-enemies no
mercy!’
Amnesty, criminality and public
response in 1953
Miriam Dobson

‘The end of the war and the transition from war to peace placed new tasks
in front of the Soviet Union’, wrote G. Safonov, General Procurator of the
USSR, in Pravda in 1948. He continued: ‘The successful completion of the
five-year plan will be an enormous step on the path towards completing
the construction of a classless socialist society and our country’s gradual
transition from socialism to communism’.1 Safonov’s millenarian approach
seems typical of post-war rhetoric. Under Stalin’s guidance, the party’s
ideologues and theorists promoted the fourth five-year plan not only as a
chance to recover from the devastation of war, but also as a means for the
country to advance to the next stage in the revolutionary journey.2
Yet the party was far from complacent. According to Stalinist doctrine,
the revolution’s advance and the imminence of communism only served to
make their enemies ever more deadly.3 Safonov’s article contained a cau-
tionary message. In order for communism to be achieved, he claimed, the
‘reinforcement and the strictest adherence to socialist legality’ was impera-
tive. He argued that the successful transition from socialism to commun-
ism necessitated a new campaign against crime. He produced an
impressive catalogue of the criminal activities still plaguing Soviet society,
which included theft of state property, substandard factory work, specu-
lation, the divulging of state secrets, lapses in revolutionary vigilance, and
violations of labour discipline. With no distinction between political, crimi-
nal, and labour offences, all were presented as actions of Soviet enemies
that would prevent the building of communism. The General Procurator
argued that the key to the revolution’s advance lay in the concept of
‘socialist legality’ (sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’), which he defined in
terms of universal vigilance, intolerance towards transgressors, and strong
state power.
In the first post-Stalin decade, the new party leaders became even more
convinced that communism was within their reach. Khrushchev, in particu-
lar, was persuaded that within two decades the Soviet citizens would be
enjoying life in the world’s first communist society. Like Safonov, Stalin’s
successors also promoted the concept of socialist legality as the key to
building this future paradise; however, the meaning they assigned to the
22 Miriam Dobson
term was to prove radically different. In a major shift, the new leaders
seemed to suggest that the criminals and miscreants vilified within Stalinist
culture in fact posed a much lesser threat to the revolution’s advance than
had been feared. No longer invoked in order to attack wrongdoers, the
notion of legality instead became associated with the regime’s new
commitment to rescuing those who had erred.
As early as March 1953, Stalinist doctrines were tacitly revised. Three
weeks after Stalin’s death, the modified version of ‘socialist legality’ was
used to explain and legitimize the launch of major criminal justice reforms.
On 27 March 1953 an amnesty was decreed and as a result, a total of
1,201,738 people were granted release; in one sweeping move, 48 per cent
of the Gulag population was set free. The first clause of the decree
released those with sentences under five years, while later clauses
amnestied pregnant women, mothers with children under ten, children
under 18, men over 55, women over 50, those convicted for certain
offences committed at work or during military service, and those sen-
tenced by laws now under review. The decree also halved sentences over
five years (though some of the gravest crimes were excluded).4 In a sub-
sequent editorial, K.P. Gorshenin, Minister of Justice, encouraged Pravda
readers to view the amnesty decree, and the promises of further criminal
justice reform that accompanied it, as evidence of ‘Soviet humanity’ and
he suggested that this new, more compassionate, brand of ‘socialist legal-
ity’ was the correct way to ensure the country’s ‘transition from socialism
to communism’.5
The coverage was not extensive, but the press did offer the Soviet public
some guidance in making sense of this important shift. The first claim was
that many criminals had been reformed during the term of their sentence.
At least in theory, the prisoners to be released had shown a ‘conscientious
attitude towards their work’ and no longer represented a danger to the
state. According to Gorshenin, the amnesty decree was evidence of the fact
that Soviet laws helped those who committed errors ‘to correct themselves’
(ispravit’sia) and then to return to the ‘path of honest labour’.6 Gorshenin’s
comment piece thus revived the notion of redemption, so celebrated in the
press in the early 1930s. Under Maksim Gor’kii’s tutelage, writers and jour-
nalists had once passionately embraced convict labour as a means to trans-
form the erring individual, producing accounts of how social aliens were
despatched to hard labour within the camp system, given intensive re-
education, thereby being ‘reforged’ as decent citizens; by the mid-1930s,
however, the motifs of transformation and re-education retreated as prison
sentences grew ever longer.7 Now in the spring of 1953, newspaper readers
were once more encouraged to recognize the individual’s potential for con-
version. They were encouraged to view Gulag returnees not as dangerous
criminals, but as reformed characters.
The second claim concerned Soviet society itself. Readers were told
that this massive release of prisoners was possible as a result of the ‘con-
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 23
solidation’ of Soviet state and society (uprochnenie obshchestvennogo i
gosudarstvennogo stroia). Soviet citizens had progressed: they enjoyed a
better standard of living; they had become more ‘conscious’; they now dis-
played an honourable attitude towards their public duty; and their ‘cul-
tural’ levels had been raised.8 Over the past decades of Soviet power,
society had allegedly matured. Where once society might have been
endangered by the presence of a few questionable elements in its midst, it
was now healthy and robust.9 Having reached a new stage in its revolution-
ary development, Soviet society could now be trusted to deal with former
offenders and deviants (admittedly, not yet all. In 1953, political prisoners
– considered one of the most dangerous categories by the authorities –
were not included in the releases, though they would be by the following
year).
Despite the upbeat note of the press in the spring of 1953, the amnesty
was to prove a major challenge for the Soviet regime. Returning zeks did
not re-integrate into the Soviet family as easily as had been hoped; by
August, senior officials were ready to identify the amnestied prisoners as
the cause of a soaring crime rate.10 Perhaps more worrying still, Soviet
society did not prove particularly receptive to the regime’s new commit-
ment to ‘Soviet humanity’ and its policies of correction. While some intel-
lectuals greeted the amnesty decree as the first indication of the reform
they sought,11 many Soviet citizens responded uneasily to the rapid and
large-scale repudiation of the Gulag monolith and did not share the
regime’s confidence in their ability to withstand the return of Stalin’s out-
casts. Drawing on the language they inherited from Stalinism, members of
the public aggressively articulated fears over the ‘bandits’, ‘gangsters’ and
‘enemies of the people’ who now threatened Soviet society.
I will first focus on the ex-prisoners, examining both the rising crime
levels and the incidents of political unrest created by the returning zeks.
Second, I examine the public response to the amnesty and argue that
many citizens were resistant to the new beliefs promoted by the post-
Stalin press. Finally, I suggest ways in which the state responded to the
problems generated by the amnesty and argue that the crisis of 1953 was
highly significant in shaping the policies of the Khrushchev era.

The Gulag return

From the outset, the police realized that the mass exodus from the Gulag
would be difficult to control. On 4 April 1953, an internal circular from the
Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, I.A. Serov, announced several meas-
ures to ‘safeguard social order and to prevent displays of criminal behavi-
our in places with a concentration of prisoners released by amnesty’. Local
authorities were instructed to provide sufficient boats and trains so that
those released did not congregate at stations and ports; police were to
have a strong presence on trains carrying large numbers of ex-prisoners
24 Miriam Dobson
and at stations where prisoners transferred, so as to prevent them assem-
bling in the parks and markets nearby; station buffets were to refrain from
selling them spirits. Even before the releases were fully underway,
returnees were regarded as a major threat to law and order. The measures
enacted revealed a clear concern that the returnees would not go ‘home’
but would remain a migrant, menacing mass. The police were told to set
up surveillance measures using the services of railways officers, local
housing committees, caretakers and other trusted people. Special attention
was likewise devoted to places where there was a concentration of
returnees, including ‘apartment-traps, dens, doss-houses’, ‘attics, cellars,
empty places, stairwells and entrances in large buildings’, and warehouses,
dacha areas, and the ‘outskirts of towns and villages’.12 In the authorities’
imagination, the returnees occupied liminal areas – on the edges of towns,
up in the attics, down below ground. Although prisoners were in theory
welcomed back into the Soviet family, Serov’s instructions suggested even
leading government figures regarded them as outsiders destined to remain
on the peripheries of society.
In the spring and early summer of 1953, the Council of Ministers real-
ized the problem was still acute, and in late May 1953 a resolution was
issued on ‘the elimination of inadequacies in the resettlement of citizens
freed by the amnesty’. The challenge they faced was not insubstantial, for
there were large numbers of new arrivals every week. A period of just ten
days might see as many as forty or fifty thousand newcomers. Reporting to
Khrushchev on the progress made by the beginning of July, officials
acknowledged that all the returnees had not been resettled by the 15 June
deadline set by the Council of Ministers.13 Even as new and more vigorous
measures were adopted, a core body of unemployed ex-prisoners
remained. Pronin, the most senior official working on returnees, acknow-
ledged the crisis was ongoing and that 16 per cent of those arriving back
from the camps had still not been resettled. He tried to provide explana-
tions for this apparent failing. It was, he said, partly due to the sheer
volume of arrivals every week, partly to local sluggishness, and he acknow-
ledged that in some areas party organizations continued to work unsatis-
factorily and continued to refuse ex-zeks both jobs and official living
space. Yet despite acknowledging some glitches, Pronin nonetheless
believed that the problem of unsettled zeks did not lie primarily with the
local authorities. Indeed, the reports Pronin was receiving from the
regions informed him that most of those who were not yet in employment
had in fact been offered work and refused it. He said these were
mostly people aged between 25 and 30, and he described them as ‘fallen
people [opustivshiesia liudi], thief-recidivists, not wishing to work hon-
estly, but once more to take the path of robbery, theft and other crimes’.14
By this point, Pronin had come to believe that the problem was not merely
administrative. The amnesty had freed a cohort of ex-convicts who had
spent much of their youth within the Gulag and who were reluctant to
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 25
establish the kind of settled, productive existence advocated by the Soviet
state.
We may, of course, wish to question the alacrity with which Pronin
exonerated the Soviet system. Indeed, the archives contain ample evid-
ence of the local authorities’ reluctance to find the necessary resources for
Gulag returnees and of the personal tragedy such hostility might engen-
der. Some returnees were so distressed by their failure to find employment
and accommodation that they even sought a return to the camps. One of
those amnestied, an accountant, wrote to the KGB laying out the dif-
ficulties returnees faced and asking either to be found work or be sent
back to the camps; when no response was forthcoming, he composed anti-
Soviet leaflets and pinned them directly on to the wall of the local Ministry
of the Interior building – the definitive act of a condemned man.15 For
those wishing to re-establish some kind of ‘normal’ existence, the obstacles
faced upon release were undoubtedly enormous. This does not, however,
mean that Pronin was entirely wrong to identify a second type of returnee.
Wending their way back from the camps were not only broken figures like
this former accountant, but also, it seems, a significant body of more com-
mitted criminals.
The root of the crisis that was to grip the nation in the summer of 1953
lay not only in the magnitude of the amnesty, but also in its composition.
By reducing sentences by half for all prisoners, the fourth clause of the
decree meant that even those given the most severe 25 year sentence,
might be set free if 12 and a half years had already been served. In fact,
over a third of those released by the amnesty had sentences of over five
years and were amnestied in accordance with this fourth clause.16 In the
seventh clause of the decree the regime had sought to filter out those it
deemed most dangerous by excluding prisoners serving sentences for
counter-revolutionary crimes, large-scale theft of socialist property, ban-
ditry and premeditated murder, but it was not entirely effective. Com-
menting on this, Roy and Zhores Medvedev suggest Beria deliberately
engineered the closing of entire camps in order to allow a massive return
of recidivist criminals, thus ensuring a crisis in the capital requiring the
presence of large numbers of MVD troops in Moscow, answerable directly
to him.17 The explanation may be simpler: many recidivists might have
been released in accordance with the decree’s prescriptions; clause seven
only listed some categories of serious crime, and only excluded them from
amnesty if this was the sentence currently being served. Either way, recidi-
vists who had already served many years inside the camps, establishing
their own extended networks and imbibing the subculture of the criminal
underworld, were now heading back from the Gulag en masse.
Across the summer of 1953, the Soviet Union experienced an unprece-
dented burst of criminal activity. In the second and third quarters of the
year the number of crimes registered showed increases of up to two-thirds
in comparison with the same period in 1952: violent attacks had increased
26 Miriam Dobson
by 66.4 per cent, murders by 30.7 per cent, rapes by 27.5 per cent, theft of
personal property by 63.4 per cent and hooliganism by 19.3 per cent.18
Reporting to the General Procurator at the end of 1953, Krasnopevtsev
and Gol’st, senior officials within the Procuracy, had no doubts as to the
causes of these dramatic increases and emphatically blamed the scale of
the amnesty. They provided compelling statistics to make their case: in
Leningrad, a full 40 per cent of those arrested between April and Septem-
ber 1953 had been beneficiaries of the March amnesty; in Penza oblast’, 45
per cent of those convicted for theft and 40 per cent of those sentenced for
murder in the same period had come almost directly from the Gulag.
Of particular concern for the authorities was the organized nature
of the returning zeks’ crimes. ‘There are many cases of these criminal-
recidivists organising criminal gangs’, wrote Krasnopevtsev and Gol’st,
before graphically describing their activities. In Chkalov province, for
example, two men named Tupitsyn and Rastsvetov – both released by the
amnesty of 27 March 1953 – had organized a criminal gang and in the
course of one summer night alone had carried out eight armed attacks on
the village of Kuvandyk. In the provincial capital of Chkalov, a certain
Nazarov, having arrived from the Gulag, formed a gang that then attacked
and robbed a passer-by, stabbing him 26 times. In the village of Degtiarka,
Sverdlov province, a group of eight ‘bandits’, all amnestied over the pre-
ceding months, descended on the local courthouse as the case of Gogo-
beridze, a particularly notorious criminal ringleader, was being heard. The
trial was disrupted and could continue only behind closed doors. The same
evening, the bandits attempted to murder the key witnesses; even when
the police arrested their leader, Morozov, they remained undeterred and
went on to attack the convoy transporting Morozov to prison and set him
free. Later in the same eventful night, they executed raids on a holiday
home and the village store.19 Detailed descriptions of these incidents were
used by the Procruracy officials to drive home the very disturbing nature
of the crime wave.
According to the report, the escalating crime levels were not simply the
result of hungry and unemployed former criminals resorting to crime to
eke out a living. The Gulag had created criminal networks of ‘uncorrected
recidivists’ (neispravimye retsidivisty); once released the members of these
bands continued to view themselves as outsiders to Soviet society and
intentionally adopted a violently anti-social way of life.

The zek as radical heretic

In a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago entitled ‘Zeks as a Nation’,
Solzhenitsyn describes how prisoners developed their own economic
system, a shared psychology, and their own language, known as matior-
shchina.20 Over the long years of Stalin’s rule, a unique camp culture had
been created which continued to set its inmates apart even after their
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 27
release. In the aftermath of the March 1953 amnesty, the nation saw not
only a rise in violent crime, but also a spate of ‘political’ offences commit-
ted by former zeks. Long sentences had apparently equipped some of
these convicts with unique ‘mental tools’ that made their re-integration
back into Soviet society remarkably difficult.21 In the briefing paper he cir-
culated on 2 April 1953, Serov had urged the camp authorities to spend
time with those to be released explaining to them the meaning of the
amnesty and impressing on them the might of the Soviet state, but the
success of this eleventh-hour educational work seems doubtful.22
It has recently been argued that the potential for ‘unbelief’ was negligi-
ble within the Stalinist system. Claiming that people lacked ‘an outside
frame of reference’, Jochen Hellbeck has argued that even when an indi-
vidual did articulate dissent, he would do so by using the regime’s own
doctrines. Thus while the state might be condemned for failing to deliver
on its promises, the ideology on which the regime was founded could not
be challenged.23 It seems possible, however, that the ‘other’ world of the
Gulag did provide an alternative set of values. While it did not offer a
coherent or independent worldview, Gulag weltanschauung seemed to
embrace all that was despised by official Soviet culture. Camp etiquette
valued drinking, violence and swearing – all acts that clearly challenged
the Soviet commitment to ‘cultured’ behaviour. Moreover, the Gulag pro-
duced its own radical politics. Here all that was demonized in the official
Soviet belief system was passionately venerated.
Those who devised the amnesty had done their best to exclude poten-
tial heretics from the release. Although by the following year the release
of political prisoners would begin, the 1953 amnesty was designed to
prevent those serving time for anti-Soviet activity benefiting, with clause
seven explicitly stipulating that the decree could not be applied to those
guilty of counter-revolutionary crimes. Yet such pre-emptive measures
were not entirely effective. Against all the regime’s proclaimed faith in ‘re-
education’, it seems that experience of the Gulag often had the reverse
effect. Even those sentenced for acts such as hooliganism and petty theft
might now themselves espouse views radically hostile to the Soviet regime.
Transformed by the Gulag, they did not necessarily exit camps as exem-
plars of the ‘new Soviet man’ so desired by the authorities, but instead
emerged bitterly alienated by their time in the netherworld of the prison
camp.
Three judicial cases offer insight into this Gulag counter-culture.
Imprisoned initially for theft or hooliganism, these men – whom we shall
call Aleksei Smirnov, Viktor Zhukov and Boris Nesterov – were all
released by the amnesty of 1953; they were then re-arrested in the period
1953–55 for their allegedly anti-Soviet activity.24 Although their first
offences had been of a non-political nature, their statements in 1953
demonstrate the radically different ‘mental tools’ with which the Gulag
had equipped them. Invariably under the influence of alcohol, some
28 Miriam Dobson
former prisoners aggressively denounced Soviet power by embracing its
nemesis: the USA.
Aleksei Smirnov, a young, semi-illiterate Russian originally from
Leningrad with three previous sentences for non-political crimes, was
released in late May 1953 by the amnesty. Unable to find work, he was still
roving across the country when he was arrested at Manzovka station in the
Far East five months later. According to the witness Koshelev, he
appeared on the station platform drunk, tried to commit a theft and then
brandished a knife. He was arrested by the station police and escorted to
their unit for further questioning. Asked to state his profession, he replied
that he had a good speciality – robbing and ‘killing citizens’. Complaining
that in the Soviet Union he was refused work, he announced: ‘I hate the
Soviet Union, I would sell it for one kopeck. I love America and Truman.
Soviet power ‘rewarded’ [nagradila] me with tuberculosis. In the Soviet
Union young people are hounded into camps and prisons’.25 He articu-
lated a fierce contempt for the values of Soviet society such as productive
labour. Even more subversive was his admiration for America and the
President. Rejecting Soviet power absolutely, Smirnov welcomed America
and Truman as the antithesis of everything Soviet.
Viktor Zhukov shared Smirnov’s binary worldview, in which the par-
adise of capitalist America opposed his Soviet hell. In September 1953, as
a 24-year-old recently released from the Gulag, Zhukov was drinking beer
with a new acquaintance at a station buffet in Kuibyshev oblast’, when he
became rowdy, attracting the attention of the police. When the police
hauled him into their office to check his documents, Zhukov spat in the
face of one police officer, kicked another, and shouted ‘Down with Soviet
power!’ and ‘Long live capitalism!’.26 With its ubiquitous slogans, the lan-
guage of revolution had created the template for Zhukov’s protest; the
Gulag – itself the mirror of the Soviet world – had taught him to invert
those official values.
The case of Boris Nesterov, another young man in his early twenties
with several years’ Gulag experience under his belt, provides another
example of this violent pro-American and pro-capitalist sentiment preval-
ent amongst former prisoners. In court in May 1954 on a further count of
theft, and facing a 25 year sentence, Nesterov began cursing Soviet
leaders, shouting that he had been sentenced unlawfully. According to a
witness, he went on to claim that Truman would come to free him and
slaughter everyone, and, finally, that ‘the Trumanites will come and they’ll
hang everyone’ in the Soviet government.27
The parallels between the cases are striking. When goaded, these ex-
zeks rallied behind the same idols – America and capitalism. All incarcer-
ated within the camp system during adolescence, they were raised in a
radically anti-Soviet environment. Released back into society, they pro-
jected themselves as atheists, radical non-believers. Though Harry Truman
vacated the White House in 1953, the name ‘Truman’ continued to res-
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 29
onate in the cosmogony of the zek as a mythical figure, an avenging angel
who would come to save Soviet unfortunates. In Stalinist culture, change
was only imaginable through a violent showdown between opposing
forces; Smirnov, Zhukov and Nesterov chose to embrace the ‘pole’ that
had been officially rejected and demonized. As Stalinist ideology had
divided the world into a set of pairs – the new versus the old, Russia versus
the West – it provided, in the form of the rejected values, ready-made for-
mulas for dissent.
Although the amnesty, and the surrounding rhetoric, suggested that the
regime wished to modify the Manichean nature of Stalinist culture, the
events of 1953 suggest that a hard-core of Gulag prisoners continued to
view the Soviet world as violently divided. Their actions severely under-
mined the regime’s claim that the prisoners released by amnesty had been
‘corrected’ in the course of imprisonment. Indeed, quite the opposite; the
Gulag had successfully nurtured an insubordinate worldview, which some
ex-convicts publicly articulated upon release. Initially imagined as a site of
redemption, the Gulag seems instead to have become a place of radical
alienation.

The public response

Empathy for the returnees was rare. One citizen, a certain A. Popov, did
write to Molotov condemning the government for its failure to find the
returnees jobs and homes and blaming this lapse for the thefts and
murders committed in the spring and summer. Yet this kind of support for
the returnees was limited, and the overwhelming mood was one of suspi-
cion and anxiety.28 Citizens’ concerns were articulated in a sudden burst of
letters addressed either to local authorities or to central bodies, such as the
Supreme Soviet.29 At a central committee plenum called in early July,
Kliment Voroshilov paid tribute to the growing public hysteria, explaining
that ‘there is much talk, and many letters – both signed and unsigned –
have been written about the murders, rapes and so on that are supposedly
the result of the amnesty’. Although Voroshilov believed that the rise in
crime had been exaggerated, he acknowledged that Soviet citizens were
distressed and that ‘alarming accounts’ were coming from regions across
the Soviet Union.30 For the party leaders therefore, the public outcry was
highly significant.
Close reading of four letters written over the course of 1953 suggests
that the public resisted and even derided notions of humanity and legality
used in the media to legitimize the amnesty. In these letters, all addressed
to Molotov, citizens went on to demand a more hostile attitude towards
those who violated public order, expressing fears that the city was becom-
ing a site of criminal and deviant behaviour. With two letters coming from
Moscow, one from Leningrad, and a fourth from the city of Kazan’, these
texts articulate an escalating urban anxiety.31
30 Miriam Dobson
Throughout the Soviet period, the trope of ‘hooliganism’ – first emerg-
ing in ‘Russian national discourse’ at the turn of the century – embodied
the nation’s ongoing struggle to bring order and respectability to urban
space.32 The discourse of hooliganism was one possible way to understand
the disruptions to Soviet life in the summer of 1953. In May, a Leningrad
mother penned Molotov a very tentative letter.33 Asking him repeatedly to
forgive her for taking up his time, she felt obliged to ask for his help. In
Leningrad, citizens were fearful, the police powerless. Emphasizing her
suffering as a mother, she evoked the collective anguish of the war:

Dear Comrade Molotov, you know how hard it is for children to lose a
father, and for parents to lose children. This isn’t the war after all. But
every day, parents mourn their children [. . .] Dear Molotov, we
mothers ask you, beg you, please make the police more vigilant, and
keep people safe.

The letter spoke for an imagined community of respectable Soviet cit-

izens who cherished family values and survived the war, but now felt tar-
geted and threatened by an unnecessary danger. This threat was
personified by the figure of the ‘hooligan’. By calling for greater police
attention, she hinted at her own fear that a lack of vigilance was threaten-
ing the community.
Other letter-writers were more belligerent, however. In contrast to the
rather lachrymose tone of the first, a second letter to Molotov manifested
a far more aggressive opposition to the amnesty and labelled the returnees
‘bandits’. The anonymous letter-writer claimed that ‘night and day, the
returnees, these jailbird-bandits [vernuvshiesia tiuremshchiki-bandity] kill
and slaughter peaceable citizens, carry out armed break-ins at warehouses,
and murder guards and policemen’.34 A third letter, from a Moscow tram-
conductor called Antonova, employed similar terms, claiming that ‘such
disgraceful horrors happen in Moscow, without even speaking about the
Moscow suburbs, where the bandits reign [tsarstvo banditov], especially
with their lairs in Nikitovka and Obiralovka, stations on the Gor’kii
railway line’.35 According to Antonova, the bandits had created their own
mini-kingdoms within the confines of Moscow. If in modern cities, certain
areas to be identified as ‘unsafe’, these tend to be the poorest and most
run-down quarters;36 in 1953, however, the danger-spots were not identi-
fied by their poverty, but as points on railway lines. Whereas the hooligan
tended to be a figure emerging from within the urban landscape, the
bandit was a man in transit, arriving by train as an outsider and an alien in
the city. Constantly reappearing in the course of 1953, the term bandit
branded criminal returnees as outsiders to the Soviet metropolis.
Letters to Molotov not only labelled returnees from the Gulag bandity,
but also adopted many of the rhetorical devices developed by the Soviet
press to cast out enemies. The anonymous letter cited above had opened:
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 31
Dear Viacheslav Mikhailovich!
Your gracious [milostivyi] decree of the 24 March of this year about
the release of criminal-recidivists, degenerates, the dregs of humanity,
has turned into a bloodbath, into carnage, inflicted on the workers of
the towns and countryside.37

Like any good Soviet journalist, the writer piled on layer after layer of
insult. The creation of compound terms like ‘jailbird-bandits’ indicated
enemies so vile that no single word could do them justice. Later in the
letter, the writer invoked one of the great enemies of Russian cultural
memory, rating the horrors Soviet citizens were currently experiencing as
greater than those ‘the blood-thirsty Ghenghis Khan inflicted on his
enemies’.38 Meanwhile, tram-driver Antonova proved equally eloquent in
her attack on ‘bandits’:

Indeed this dirty water, these Russian ‘gangsters’ [‘gangstery’] are

without conscience [sovest’] or honour [chest’]. We conquered
Germany when she was armed to the teeth, can it really be that our
state is without the strength to conquer these parasites [darmoedy]?39

By invoking Germany, she categorically branded the criminals enemies;

by labelling them ‘dirty water’ and ‘parasites’, she additionally warned of
their contagious nature. The term ‘gangster’ was more unusual. A more
recent borrowing than either ‘bandit’ or ‘hooligan’, the word ‘gangster’
was still regarded as a foreign word, and indicated her desire to brand the
returnees outsiders. Choosing to label them ‘Russian’ rather than ‘Soviet’,
she dismissed the returnees as part of the old, uncultured past that the
Soviet world had supplanted. Antonova was grappling to find an effective
rhetoric with which to repel the contingent of ex-convicts as a phenome-
non completely alien to the respectable realm of Soviet society. Exposed
to Stalinist newspeak for the last quarter of a century, Antonova and the
other letter-writers manipulated established invective to condemn and
vilify the unwanted returnees.
While Pravda editorials claimed that those released from the camps had
shown a conscientious attitude towards work during their time in the Gulag,
readers were more suspicious. Challenging the claims made in the press, one
correspondent from Kazan’ asked: ‘Why didn’t Stalin – who so valued the
people’s labour – do this? In the month or so since Comrade Stalin’s death,
have the criminals really become ‘conscious’ [soznatel’nye] citizens?’.40 Dis-
traught that the people had lost their most heroic defender, the author ques-
tioned the notion that a criminal could so easily be brought to
consciousness. The revived notions of ‘correction’ and ‘humanity’ were also
contested. One letter-writer wrote that ‘these “corrected” [“ispravshiesia”]
down-and-outs use their knives to strengthen the forces of darkness in the
country’; placed in inverted commas, the term ‘ispravshiesia’ was clearly a
32 Miriam Dobson
source of derision.41 The tram-driver Antonova was equally distrustful of the
word, reminding her readers that ‘only the grave corrects the hunchback’
(gorbatogo ispravit mogila). She also employed the term gummanichat’ (a
pejorative variant on the idea of being humane) and advised Molotov that
there had been quite enough of this already. Gorshenin’s promotion of
Soviet humanity and correction had clearly failed to convince Pravda
readers, and the terms were either rejected or mocked by angry members of
the public.
Antonova ended her letter with some suggestions for how the authori-
ties should deal with criminals. She wrote:

We ask you to decree a law, which says that a thief who is caught will
have five fingers cut off from his left hand, they should be branded, so
that people will know that these are thieves and can beware of them.
Merciless and severe measures should be taken.42

If the Gulag was no longer to ensure the geographical exclusion of offend-

ers, physical mutilation was – in Antonova’s mind – the only way to retain
clear boundaries between respectable society and its deviants.
If the crime wave undercut the regime’s claim that those amnestied
were reformed characters, then the venom of the public outcry challenged
the assertion that Soviet society was ready to cope with the massive return
of ex-convicts. Using terminology drawn from Stalinist rhetoric, letter-
writers continued to view those who had committed errors as irre-
deemable enemies and insisted that it was the state’s duty to protect Soviet
citizens from these dangerous hordes.

Ambiguity in the Soviet press

Close study of the Soviet press suggests that newspaper editors experi-
enced some uncertainty in dealing with the difficult events of 1953. On
their front pages, the newspapers continued to praise the regime’s new-
found humanity and trumpeted the regime’s commitment to this modified
version of ‘socialist legality’, which was also used to explain two other
important political events: the retraction of the Doctors’ Plot in April and
the arrest of Lavrentii Beria in July. On the back pages, however, a slightly
different story was emerging.
The summer of 1953 saw the Soviet press radically increase the inches
of newspaper print dedicated to law-and-order news.43 On 18 June 1953,
the back page of Pravda contained the rubric ‘From the courtroom’ and,
under the simple headline ‘Thief-recidivist’, the reader learned how the
criminal Kotov was tried for pick-pocketing and sent down for six years –
his sixth sentence.44 One week later, Pravda reported that the organizer of
a gang of armed thieves working in the Moscow suburbs had been sen-
tenced for 25 years.45 Local newspapers took the cue, and there was a
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 33
dramatic rise in the number of ‘From the courtroom’ (Iz zala suda) articles
over the coming months.46 The back-page crime reports provided ample
evidence of the criminal activity afflicting Soviet society.
Mirroring the rhetoric of letters addressed to the government in the
spring of 1953, these articles employed the term bandit, with the headline
‘Bandit punished’ repeated many times over the coming months. In Sep-
tember 1953, Leningradskaia pravda reported the case of Vinogradov,
released from prison by the amnesty in 1953. Although sentenced to 20
years imprisonment for theft and not banditry, he is called the ‘bandit’
throughout the text.47 Similarly in December, L. Reinberg and V. Shangin,
also beneficiaries of the amnesty, were identified as bandits, though they
too had been sentenced only for theft.48 The articles firmly portrayed
offenders as outsiders newly arrived in the city. Even where the amnesty
was not directly mentioned, references to ‘return’ served to identify the
offenders as aliens: one article began, ‘Having returned from places of
imprisonment several years ago, Kazimir Krukovskii . . .’; a second men-
tioned that the criminals ‘returned last spring to Moscow’; a third that they
arrived in Leningrad in early 1953.49 In the media’s representation, the
criminals worked in bands, preying on the city, but not a part of it.
According to Moskovskaia pravda, four criminals met on the platform of
the Moscow–Kursk–Donbass rail depot one day in October 1953; they
drank heavily and then set off for Moscow with the intention of commit-
ting a robbery at Kursk station. Once in Moscow, however, they decided
to ‘travel’ (puteshestvovat’) around Moscow on the tram – and robbed the
conductor.50 By identifying trams as places of danger, the article substanti-
ated the claims made by Antonova, the letter-writing tram driver from
Moscow; moreover, by presenting them first on the platform of a provin-
cial station, and only later in Moscow, the narrative also supported
Antonova in her desire to portray the source of crime as external to urban
Soviet society.
Challenging the state’s new commitment to correcting criminals, the
crime reports included biographies in which the offenders appeared as
incurable sinners. Journalists described how these reprobates had taken to
a life of delinquency from a very early age, and implied that as born crimi-
nals they could never be transformed into decent Soviet citizens. In one
such report, the biography of a criminal named Vinogradov was given:
‘His biography is simple. He was born in 1928. He didn’t want to study,
nor to work like all the others in his generation worked during the war
[. . .] At sixteen, Vinogradov was sent to prison for the first time. Since
1944 he has been sentenced six times and to a total of 28 years in correc-
tive labour camps’.51 No excuses were offered, no extenuating circum-
stances put forward to explain his crimes. In contrast to the promises of
greater humanity and legality promoted on the newspapers’ front pages,
these biographies seemed to reject the possibility that a criminal might
be reformed or ‘corrected’. Indeed, the articles derided the idea that a
34 Miriam Dobson
criminal might return as part of the amnesty to become a valued member
of society. After recounting the sad facts of his life, the report on Vino-
gradov’s case shifted from the court scene to an imagined family scene:

The amnesty offered Vinogradov the chance to start a new life – to

become an honest worker.
Work? No way! – Vinogradov told his mother, when he arrived in
Leningrad last summer.

By juxtaposing the offer of a ‘new life’ with Vinogradov’s scorn, the

article undermined the official reading of the amnesty and questioned the
belief that offenders could be redeemed through labour.
Crime reports thus used a combination of rhetorical strategies to cast
criminals as marauders ravaging Soviet society. It is significant that in
doing so, crime reporters employed terms that were extraordinarily similar
to those found in citizens’ letters. Although the Soviet press is usually seen
as a tool for sculpting the thoughts and beliefs of its readers, here it seems
almost to echo public opinion. The result was the highly dialogic quality of
the press over the course of 1953: on the one hand, newspapers promoted
the party’s desire to re-educate those who erred; on the other, they hinted
at the incurable nature of the criminal. Official rhetoric was thus far from
univocal, and this pointed to the party’s own uncertainty about the future
course of the socialist legality campaign.

The party response

Doubts were clearly emerging in party circles by the summer. Continuing
the ‘socialist legality campaigns’ of the spring, the party and state appar-
atus devoted huge energies to drafting reforms in many areas of criminal
justice.52 Yet they simultaneously decreed more stringent policing meas-
ures to deal with the problem of violent crime.53 At the end of August
1953, R.A. Rudenko, General Procurator, tried to clarify the situation. In
a statement explaining the implementation of the new measures, he
blamed the crime wave on the incompetence of the Ministry of the Inte-
rior, which until recently had been led by Lavrentii Beria, now disgraced
and under arrest. He reassured his readers that criminality would soon
decline and he reiterated the position put forward in the amnesty decree,
repeating almost verbatim earlier assertions about society’s high levels of
‘culturedness’ and ‘consciousness’.54 Ultimately, the party stayed commit-
ted to its decision to downsize the Gulag, and by January 1956 the total
number of prisoners held in camps and colonies had fallen to 781,630,
approximately a third of its size on 1 April 1953.55 Although it continued
the policies begun on 27 March, however, the ‘cold summer of 1953’ had
forced party leaders to realize that long-term solutions were needed to
tackle the double problem of rising crime and public outrage.56
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 35
By the following year, it seems, the party had decided upon a course of
action intended to remedy the crisis created by the amnesty; 1954 saw the
launch of a broad public campaign to promote correct byt – a term that
translates as ‘way of life’, ‘everyday life’, ‘domesticity’ or ‘life-style’. The
Yearbook of Soviet Publications included the category of byt for the first
time in 1954, with 14 new titles in that year and a steady increase recorded
over the decade.57 The new publications included titles like Communist
Morality and Byt, Towards A Healthy Byt, The Culture of Correct Behavi-
our amongst Soviet Young People.58 This renewed attention to ‘everyday
life’ marked the state’s attempt to change the way citizens thought and
behaved. Despite the bold claims made in the amnesty decree – and later
reiterated by Rudenko – the levels of ‘consciousness’ and ‘culture’ were
found wanting. Not only targeting those whose own behaviour was unde-
sirable, the campaign sought to mobilize the ranks of ‘decent’ (chestnye)
Soviet citizens in the fight against criminal, deviant or improper conduct.
This new emphasis on byt was reflected in an important shift in crime-
reportage. If in 1953, reports had consistently portrayed criminals as
bandits and incurable sinners, such depictions – though they did not
entirely disappear – became more rare. New sorts of offenders began to
populate the ‘From the courtroom’ column in 1954. Rather than strangers
from the alien world of the Gulag, aggressors might be members of the
Soviet community who had been allowed to lapse into an unhealthy and
un-Soviet way of life. Culprits were no longer presented as members of a
prison subculture, but instead as members of Soviet youth who desper-
ately needed society’s assistance to ensure their healthy byt. In August
1954, for example, an article headlined ‘In drunken intoxication’ opened
by telling readers that a young joiner named V. Eroshin was often seen
drunk, and that rather than spending his free time with his family, he pre-
ferred to hang out with his drinking companions. With neighbours cast as
witnesses to his debauched ways, Eroshin was identified as a member of
the Soviet community, not an outsider. The reader was given to under-
stand that Eroshin’s problems began with the kind of anti-social behaviour
that some might – erroneously, of course – consider insignificant. Eroshin’s
transgressions soon escalated. While drunk one summer evening, he
insulted a young girl on the street, and when one of her young companions
tried to reason with him, Eroshin stabbed him. In a second article entitled
‘Hooligan’, an 18-year-old from Leningrad was sentenced for attacking a
young girl. Again the roots of the problem lay with the protagonist’s daily
conduct. Preferring ‘hooligan’ behaviour to hard work or study, Gennadii
Fedorov drank, insulted passers-by on the street, and organized parties
(deboshi) at home during the night. The reader was to infer that it was
only one short step from these hooligan acts to violently assaulting a
schoolgirl. Neither Eroshin nor Fedorov were presented as members of a
prison subculture, yet their dissolute life-style led them to commit heinous
crimes.59 Replacing the marauding bandit of 1953, the press now presented
36 Miriam Dobson
the ‘hooligan’ who was a product of an urban habitat. Bad behaviour such
as drinking, swearing and hooliganism were thus to be taken seriously, for
they apparently indicated that the individual was on the path towards full-
blown criminal activity. Instead of simply lamenting the rise in crime as
they had done in 1953, citizens were taught that they must play a positive,
instructive role in preventing the emergence of new deviants. Members of
Soviet society were invited to take an active role in raising moral, healthy
citizens of the future.
The 1950s thus saw the regime take a two-pronged approach to crime.
First, the party sought to correct offenders, instead of vilifying them.
Second, extensive propaganda sought to persuade ‘respectable’ Soviet cit-
izens that they could play an active role in these re-educational practices.
By joining volunteer brigades, comrade courts and other civic initiatives,
or simply being on the look-out for erring youths, they were invited to play
a leading role in the fight against crime.60
Yet the public responses of 1953 were early indicators of the problems
which these initiatives would encounter. Public resistance to the notions of
‘correction’ and Soviet ‘humanity’ remained high. Commenting on the
influx of letters the Supreme Soviet received from outraged citizens on the
subject of crime, one official wrote in December 1955 that ‘after a signific-
ant rise in the numbers of these letters in 1953 and the beginning of 1954,
the numbers gradually decreased until the present time when it has started
to grow again’.61 Two years later, Voroshilov forwarded a letter from
employees at the Mining Institute in Moscow to all the leading figures in
the government. The letter detailed the many attacks suffered by their col-
leagues over the past two years and asserted that many crimes went unre-
ported because the victims feared reprisals. Having demonized the culprits
as ‘unreformed bandits’ and the ‘the dregs of society’, the letter concluded
with a slogan worthy of any Bolshevik agitator: ‘Show the bandit-enemies
no mercy!’ (Banditam – vragam naroda – ne mozhet byt’ poshady!).62 Once
again, offenders were imagined not as sinners awaiting salvation, but as
dangerous bandits and deadly enemies of the Soviet regime.
By 1961, the motifs of redemption and re-education were again under
threat. The introduction of anti-parasite laws saw the government swing
once more in the direction of exclusion, not inclusion.63 Assemblies were
to be formed in each street or housing-block, and on their collective ruling
citizens deemed to lead a ‘parasitic’ life could be exiled for periods of up
to five years. This new act allowed Soviet communities to rid their neigh-
bourhood of those whose behaviour they considered anti-social. Although
the branding and mutilation coveted by the tram-driver Antonova in 1953
were not to materialize, the new decree granted community activists
significant new powers, enabling them to eject undesirables from the
Soviet ‘family’.
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 37
Conclusion
The problems engendered by the amnesty reveal the difficult legacies of
Stalinism. The new leaders wished to downsize the enormous, inefficient
and unruly Gulag, but they had to find ways to rehabilitate and re-
integrate over one million men and women who had been isolated from
society, some of whom continued to resent their alienation. Perhaps sur-
prisingly, they also faced an aggrieved public. Rather than welcoming
reform, many citizens seem to have found the process disturbing. In
response to the mass exodus from the Gulag, they expressed violent
opposition to the notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘correction’ promoted in the
press, and derided the regime’s claims that society itself was sufficiently
robust to withstand this return of the banished ‘other’.
Initially uncertain how to resolve the crisis, Stalin’s successors came to
believe that renewed attention to byt was the key to creating a well-
ordered and self-regulating society. Desperate to keep the Gulag popu-
lation low, they claimed that it was possible to reform offenders within
society by means of new campaigns for correct byt. Yet for such initiatives
to be successful, high levels of social activism were required, and these
were to prove elusive. In a world where crime and delinquency seemed
increasingly prevalent, Soviet citizens continued to envision offenders and
criminals as enemies, evincing little interest in ‘correcting’ them. Public
responses to the amnesty of 1953 and the campaigns that followed point to
the embedded nature of the Stalinist worldview and indicate the problem-
atic nature of reform in the post-Stalinist period.

Notes
1 ‘Vsemerno ukrepliat’ sotsialisticheskuiu zakonnost’’, Pravda, 20 June 1948,
p. 2.
2 A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the
Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 33.
3 In a keynote speech in 1937, Stalin proclaimed: ‘The further we advance and
the more success we have, the more embittered the defeated remains of the
exploiting class become, the more treacherous their attack on us will be, the
more dirty tricks they will play against the Soviet state, and the more reckless
the weapons they will use, as the last attempt of the doomed.’ This interpreta-
tion of revolutionary eschatology was to prevail until 1953. I.V. Stalin, ‘O
nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistkikh i inykh dvu-
rushnikov: Doklad na plenume TsK VKP(b) 3 March 1937 g.’, in R. McNeal
(ed.), I.V. Stalin: Sochineniia, vol. 1, Stanford: Hoover Institution Foreign Lan-
guage Publications, 1967, pp. 189–224 (213).
4 ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ob Amnistii’, Pravda, 28 March
1953, p. 1.
5 ‘Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ na strazhe interesov naroda’, Pravda, 17 April
1953, p. 2.
6 Pravda, 17 April 1953, p. 2.
7 Katerina Clark identifies a transitional period between 1931 and late 1935 in
which a combination of rehabilitation and isolation prevailed. Gor’kii’s
38 Miriam Dobson
Belomor was the guiding model, but similar accounts were common in the
Soviet press. See K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual, 3rd edn,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 118–19; M. Gor’kii, L. Auer-
bach, and S.G. Firin (eds), Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New
Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis,
London: John Lane, 1935; S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999, p. 78.
8 Pravda, 28 March 1953, p. 1.
9 See Daniel Beer, ‘ “The Hygiene of Souls”: Languages of Illness and Contagion
in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,’ PhD diss., University of Cambridge,
2001, on how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks articulated deep anxiety
about the contagious nature of crime, fearing that their new society was at risk
of infection.
10 GARF, 8131/32/2386/2.
11 Kornei Chukosvskii, for instance, wrote in his diary that the amnesty had ‘filled
his days with happiness’. See K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1930–1969, Moscow:
Sovremennyi Pisatel’, 1994, p. 197.
12 GARF, 9401/1a./521/14.
13 Between 20 and 30 of June 1953, for example, 45,400 ex-convicts arrived in
towns and cities. RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7.
14 RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7.
15 GARF, 8131/31/7141/8.
16 GARF, 7523/89/4408/79.
17 R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 9.
18 GARF, 8131/32/2386/28.
19 GARF, 8131/32/2386/32-33.
20 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary
Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, vol. 2, New York: Harper and Row,
1975, pp. 502–33 (505).
21 In his study of French culture of the sixteenth century, Febvre frames the
question of unbelief in the following way: Did individuals have access to the
necessary ‘mental’ tools needed to express an alternative worldview?
L. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of
Rabelais, trans. B. Gottlieb, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982,
p. 355.
22 GARF, 9401/1a/521/14.
23 J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi,
1931–9’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, London: Routledge,
2000, pp. 77–116 (105).
24 To protect the identity of the individuals involved, and to reflect the
private nature of the materials consulted, pseudonyms have been used in this
section.
25 GARF, 8131/31/43332/18.
26 GARF, 8131/31/60332/5-8. Zhukov came from a peasant family near Omsk and
had been sentenced for various non-political crimes, including theft and
attempted escape from the Gulag. Back in the Gulag in 1954, he became an
active participant in a camp riot.
27 GARF, 8131/31/50509/22-25.
28 RGASPI, 82/2/1456/2.
29 GARF, 7523/107/189/65.
30 RGANI, 2/1/42/12.
31 Molotov’s personal fond (RGASPI, f. 82) contains a wealth of correspondence
 Amnesty, criminality and public response 39
from Soviet citizens in the 1950s. A great many letters were anonymous, some
were composed collectively, and some were individually signed. The authors
came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
32 J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg,
1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
33 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/72.
34 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
35 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
36 Neuberger views hooligan behaviour as a response to the relentless poverty
experienced in some of the slum areas of St Petersburg. Neuberger, Hooligan-
ism, 216–78.
37 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. The anonymous correspondent mistakes the date of the
amnesty decree.
38 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
39 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
40 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/58.
41 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
42 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
43 The rubric ‘From the courtroom’ (Iz zala suda) was not in itself a new inven-
tion. Not only had it been common in the pre-revolutionary boulevard press,
the column had also appeared in the Stalinist press. See L. McReynolds, The
News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation
Press, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
44 ‘Vor-Retsidivist’, Pravda, 18 June 1953, p. 4.
45 ‘Khuligany-Grabiteli’, Pravda, 24 June 1953, p. 4.
46 This section is based on a close study of Pravda, Leningradskaia pravda,
Moskovskaia pravda and Prizyv (the local newspaper for Vladimir oblast’)
over the course of 1953 and 1954. Leningradskaia pravda published three
‘From the courtroom’ articles in late June, while Moskovskaia Pravda, which
had not contained a single crime report between March and August, published
six in the final four months of the year. Prizyv published four reports ‘from the
courtroom’ between October and December, compared with one article in the
first half of the year.
47 ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4.
48 ‘Grabiteli poimany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4.
49 ‘Bandity nakazany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 23 June 1953, p. 4; ‘Shaika vorov-
retsidivistov’, Pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4; ‘Grabiteli’, Leningradskaia
pravda, 27 December 1953, p. 4.
50 ‘Bandity nakazany’, Moskovskaia pravda, 2 December 1953, p. 4.
51 ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4.
52 For a detailed survey of the debate surrounding criminal justice reform, see Y.
Gorlizki, ‘De-Stalinisation and the Politics of Russian Criminal Justice,
1953–1964,’ PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1992, pp. 93–4.
53 On 27 August 1953, the Soviet of Ministers issued a decree ‘On Measures For
Strengthening The Protection Of Public Order And For Intensifying The
Struggle Against Criminal Behaviour’.
54 GARF, 8131/32/2386/1-7.
55 On 1 April 1953, the figure was recorded as 2,466,914. See GARF,
7523/89/4408/82.
56 The term ‘cold summer’ refers to a perestroika era film which depicts how the
natural rhythms of an isolated fishing hamlet in northern Russia were shattered
when a band of criminals, granted freedom by the amnesty, attacked and ran-
sacked the village. See Kholodnoe Leto 53, directed by Aleksandr Proshkin,
1987, USSR.
40 Miriam Dobson
57 On the growing publication of advice literature from 1954 onwards, see C.
Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from
Catherine to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. For details of the
publications on byt see Ibid., appendix 5.
58 Ezhegodnik knig SSSR 1954: II-polugodie, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznoi
palaty, 1955, p. 256; Ezhegodnik knig SSSR 1955: II-polugodie, Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznoi palaty, 1956, p. 294.
59 ‘V p’ianom ugare’, Moskovskaia pravda, 7 August 1954, p. 4; ‘Khuligan’,
Leningradskaia pravda, 5 June 1954, p. 4.
60 This is explored in further detail in chapter 4 of my PhD dissertation (M.
Dobson, ‘Refashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destal-
inisation, 1953–1964,’ PhD diss., University of London, 2003, pp. 173–224).
61 GARF, 7523/107/189/65.
62 GARF, 7523/89/7272/7-8.
63 The law passed by the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 4 May 1961 gave
collective assemblies the power to resettle the ‘parasite’ elsewhere. Similar laws
were passed in May and June 1961 in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Estonia
and Moldavia. See H. Berman, Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet
Law, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 291–8.
2 From the Secret Speech to the
burial of Stalin
Real and ideal responses to
de-Stalinization
Polly Jones

The campaign of de-Stalinization, or ‘overcoming the cult of personality’,

was a unique episode in the history of Soviet public opinion. Never before
had the party been, and rarely would it be again, so indecisive in its
approach to the Soviet past, propagating contradictory views of
Stalin(ism) in a series of advances and retreats unprecedented in the
party’s history.1 And never again would the party unleash such a torrent of
conflicting and controversial views from the Soviet public. Whilst the cam-
paign intentionally set out to emancipate the popular consciousness from
the Stalin cult, it also inadvertently risked the ‘de-Sovietization’ of public
opinion, as swathes of the Soviet population reacted in violent, unpre-
dictable and ‘anti-Soviet’ ways to de-Stalinization. Over the course of the
‘decade of de-Stalinization’ (1953–63/4), the party failed to delineate a
strict party line, whether on de-Stalinization itself, or on the myriad prob-
lems of party and social discipline which were its unintended con-
sequences.
However, as this chapter will argue, distinct stages in the anti-Stalin
campaign can be discerned, and they suggest a growing confidence on the
part of the Khrushchev regime in the management of public opinion.
Comparing the forms of public responses to the 20th Party Congress
(1956) and the 22nd Party Congress (1961), this chapter contends that,
despite the rhetoric of ‘advancing’ or ‘completing’ de-Stalinization which
surrounded the latter event’s more public revelations about Stalin, the
22nd Congress in many senses signalled a retreat from radicalism and a
retrenchment of party restrictions in the Soviet public sphere. The
progress of the anti-Stalin campaign indicates a fundamental dilemma of
de-Stalinization: as the party grew more confident in publicizing its icono-
clastic narratives about the Stalinist past, it also, paradoxically (although
perhaps necessarily) reduced its commitment to de-Stalinizing the Soviet
public sphere, setting strict limits on popular iconoclasm and further
public debate about the Stalin question.2
42 Polly Jones
The 20th Party Congress: information management?
If, in giving his Secret Speech, Khrushchev achieved a significant ‘break-
through’ and ‘crossed a rubicon’, he and his party almost immediately
started to repair what had been broken, and to redraw the boundaries sep-
arating Soviet from anti-Soviet responses to the campaign.3 Aleksei
Adzhubei aptly captures these successive retreats: ‘the truth of the XX
Congress was very quickly limited to a half-truth, and later, by the mid-
1960s, the “secret” stamp was placed on the whole range of problems
again’.4 By charting some of the problems which de-Stalinization threw up,
and the party’s responses to them, it becomes clear that public opinion at
home was a significant influence on this tortuous journey through de-
Stalinization. What quickly emerged from the bruising experience of dis-
seminating the Secret Speech was a blueprint for the management of
public opinion which would be deployed in a more timely and efficient
manner during subsequent episodes of de-Stalinization.
As an exercise in historical revisionism, the Secret Speech was at best a
partial success, lacking theoretical rigour and historical accuracy.5 As a
campaign meant to mobilize unanimous public opinion, it was an unmiti-
gated disaster.6 The party meeting was supposed to be the ideal setting in
which to propagate de-Stalinization. Once the party had decided to reveal
its ‘Secret’ Speech, it was envisaged that at each successive level of the
party hierarchy – regional, city, district and primary party organization
(PPO) – the speech would be read out and collectively approved by those
present.7 Yet in reality, even the most practised members of the aktiv
could barely conceal their distress, outrage and confusion upon hearing
the Secret Speech.
Apart from the evident ‘shock’ of the revelations, the problem also lay
in the fact that the party, at least initially, apparently encouraged a pas-
sionate, outraged response. Central Committee (CC) presidium meetings
where the speech was drafted were themselves highly emotional, and
emotive, as ‘Stalin’s heirs’ grappled with the leader’s legacy.8 The speech
ranks amongst the most dramatic ‘performances’ in the history of Soviet
speech-making.9 The controlled way in which the speech was to be dissem-
inated to the party at large might have been intended to minimize disrup-
tion and controversy, but it in fact provoked frenzied speculation and
frustration. Most importantly, within the speech, there were numerous
projections of the ideal ‘popular response’, and in the version circulated
around party organizations, applause was even added in at strategic points,
which stressed the positive, rather than the negative aspects of de-
Stalinization, such as the return to Leninism.10 The speech therefore swung
between mobilizing feelings of vengeance and disgust at Stalin’s wrongdo-
ing, and encouraging optimism about the neo-Leninist future.
Reports about party meetings sent to the centre tried their best to
imitate this mentally taxing combination of sentiments. One report from
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 43
Leningrad, which typified the search for an ideal ‘script’ of public opinion,
claimed that audiences across the oblast’ had greeted the ‘Leninist’ and
other positive segments of the speech with the traditional stormy
applause.11 At the same time, audiences had also reacted ‘with a feeling of
condemnation and agitation’ (osuzhdeni[e] i vzvolnovannos[t’]) to the rev-
elations about Stalin’s wrongdoing.12 To synthesize these two antithetical
reactions, it was usual to highlight speeches which claimed that the party
had successfully resurrected Leninist traditions, remaining undamaged by
the Stalin revelations.13 One speaker, at the Mari obkom meeting, claimed
to be experiencing two feelings simultaneously: happiness and satisfaction
that the subject of the cult had been brought up, along with ‘bitter indigna-
tion’ (gor’kaia obida) at the party’s past sins.14 The truth (pravda) about
Stalin was, ideally, only temporarily disturbing and disheartening; it was
‘difficult, but it had to be told’.15 The honesty with which the party had
tackled the subject of its past, depressing as it was, meant that party
members could react with ‘pleasure’ to the grisly revelations of the
speech.16 Needless to say, many more speeches – not to mention questions
and notes – diverged seriously from this script, even at obkom level, and to
an even greater degree at raikom and PPO level. The mixture of emotions
which the Secret Speech stimulated was a volatile, heady compound.
There were numerous ways in which even well intentioned speakers
could get it wrong. Hyperbole – exaggerating the criticism of Stalin
beyond Khrushchev’s, ultimately rather ambiguous, criticisms – may have
reflected the desire to mimic the speech’s discourse, but it is more likely
that such ‘sharp speeches’17 derived from genuine shock and disgust at the
new revelations. The former possibility is contained in the purportedly re-
assuring claim from the head of the Party organs department of Komi
obkom, that, ‘I assure you that communists . . . after they find out the truth
about what Stalin did, will turn away from him and forget about him’.18
The latter tendency, toward spontaneous revulsion, is exemplified in the
response of one Sidorov, a senior engineer at a factory in the Krasnoiarsk,
for whom ‘all the greatness of Stalin, about which so much was said for
more than twenty years, has evaporated into thin air’.19 This was echoed in
another ‘sharp’ condemnation of Stalin in Leningrad by a Hero of the
Soviet Union, who claimed that knowing even the tiniest fraction of all the
evil which Stalin had committed was ‘enough . . . to erase memories of him
forever’.20 Gory imagery featured in the unequivocal condemnations of
Stalin which frequently accompanied requests for changes to the mau-
soleum and other symbols, alleging that Stalin had ‘covered his hands in
blood’ or was ‘bloody and dirty’ (krovavo-griaznyi).21
Meanwhile, other speeches contained detailed witness testimony of
repression.22 Old Communists – members of the party who had joined in
the Lenin era – exemplified the precarious balance sought in responses to
the speech. Whilst they represented the path back to Leninist purity,23
they also embodied a dangerous pre-occupation with the past, seeing their
44 Polly Jones
mission as the independent exploration of the Stalinist past, well beyond
what the party envisaged.24 In Saratov, for instance, it was reported that
many victims of the Terror spoke about their memories, including one
farm director who ‘with great agitation announced that communists of the
older generation cannot forget the repressions against honest people’.25 In
Stalingrad, one communist who had been in the party since 1917 deplored
the ‘epidemic of the cult of personality’ in the city.26 In Sverdlovsk, the
aktiv of the city’s Old Bolsheviks enthusiastically condoned the Secret
Speech (with one saying that he ‘literally felt 50 years younger’), yet also
seemed determined to continue to focus on the Terror, pledging their
assistance to the city’s museum in creating exhibits about the cult.27
Such acutely critical and passionate statements about the past were
especially hard to interpret, or condemn, and they were often simply
reported, for the Central Committee to process as they wished.28 At other
times, such statements, especially unflattering comparisons with Tsarist
times, were noted as angry, or ‘extreme’ (krainosti).29 These iconoclastic
discourses were, at least initially, seen as excusable excesses of emotion.
To use Katerina Clark’s formulation, these reactions were the first stage
on the journey from spontaneity (an emotional initial reaction) to con-
sciousness (a more rational view of the Stalinist past).30
However, where party meetings seriously overstepped the line, the
party was forced to come up with a clearer statement, if not on the increas-
ingly vexed question of the Stalinist past, then at least on the regulations
governing public opinion in the present. Numerous closed party meetings,
often at PPO level, played host to ‘anti-Soviet’ comments and discussions,
which passed from the criticism of Stalinism to criticism of the Soviet
system. Amongst the most famous examples, which quickly achieved
nationwide prominence, were the discussions of the Soviet system’s fail-
ings at the Thermo-Technical Laboratory in Moscow,31 the Academy of
Sciences’ Social Sciences, Oriental and Ethnographic Institutes, and the
Leningrad Writers Union.32 However, the criticisms voiced here had their
counterpart in other places not in the Soviet intellectual heartland, as
ordinary listeners voiced their outrage or incomprehension at what they
had heard.33
In all cases, what seemed to bother the central authorities reading these
reports was not so much the individual misdemeanour, as much as the fact
that local authorities were too slow to pick up on anti-Soviet opinion.34
The problem of inadequate rebuttal (otpor) of the first glimmers of anti-
Soviet thought was ubiquitous, affecting each level of the party authorities,
and having a ‘knock-on effect’ on the policing of dissent, which often hap-
pened after the fact and within a different setting from where it first
occurred.
No-one was immune from transgression. There were, for instance,
many obkom meetings which had to be diverted away from celebrations of
the 20th Congress, toward correction of controversial speeches by high-
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 45
ranking members. In Bashkiriia, for instance, speaking at the obkom aktiv
meeting, Kovrigin, director of the oblast’ party school, spoke at length
about the mentality of the cult (‘the cult of personality . . . is lodged in our
brains’) and blamed it on Stalin’s entourage. Summing up the meeting, the
obkom secretary criticized Kovrigin, claiming ‘one might have expected a
different, more elegant and clear speech’ from him, as one of the main
figures in the local party organization.35 Meanwhile, in Kalinin, a leading
figure in the local organization for the dissemination of political and
scientific knowledge, Gerasmeni, made similar allegations, blaming
Molotov, Mikoian and Voroshilov for not speaking out against the cult,
calling the Stalin era ‘a black page in our history’.36 Discussion of Geras-
meni’s speech dominated subsequent proceedings. Speakers cautioned
against revealing what he said to the population at large, and the director
of the oblast’ party school claimed that Gerasmeni had distorted the true
optimism of the people, concluding derisively, ‘what kind of black page is
this?’. Lastly, at the Tatar obkom aktiv meeting, a factory director claimed
that ‘each of us is guilty to some degree for the flourishing of the cult of
personality . . . we were not able to protest and say what we thought’. The
speaker, Smirnov, was reproached by the meeting chair for blaming the
party; the error was put down to a ‘slip of the tongue’ (ogovorka), in an
attempt not to derail the party meeting completely.37
There were many more cases, however, where the party line was not
effectively enforced by others present. These proved especially worrying
for the central authorities, and the post facto solutions improvised to these
local crises in March and April 1956 set a blueprint for pre-emptive strikes
against future dissent. One case in Sakhalin, investigated by the depart-
ment for party organs, is illustrative of these evolving mechanisms of
control.38 Here, a raikom aktiv meeting had played host to a number of
‘demagogic’ speeches, in which speakers alleged that the ‘disorientated’
party had made serious mistakes in not tackling the cult earlier, and that
Stalin had done more harm to the party than any other leading figure.39
Although many of those present condemned these ideas, others suggested
that the meeting should draft and pass a resolution condemning the Secret
Speech as mistimed (ne svoevremennyi). Although this was rejected, the
raikom authorities still came under fire from the obkom, for not moving to
condemn the speakers or punish them.40 Meanwhile, the obkom in its turn
was criticized by the central authorities for its failure to punish the wrong-
doers in question.41 In other cases, where the central authorities were not
directly involved, the same pattern could be observed, with authorities
bringing organizations lower down the hierarchy to order. For instance, in
Tuva, a non-Communist who claimed, in conversation with a Party organi-
zation secretary, that ‘now you don’t even know who to believe’ and
accused the Politburo of self-interest (‘they were saving their own skins’),
was summoned to Tuva gorkom after undergoing ‘insufficient’ punishment
at the PPO where he had heard the speech.42 In Kaliningrad, finally,
46 Polly Jones
several komsomol members at a school administration meeting about the
Secret Speech criticized the Soviet electoral system in quasi-Trotskyist
terms. At the meeting itself, their ‘anti-Soviet’ speeches were not met with
the necessary rebuttal (otpor), and only after intervention by the gorkom
were the main culprits expelled and their accomplices given formal warn-
ings.43
Whilst these allegations of negligence were clearly a form of scapegoat-
ing, shifting the blame from the authors of the Secret Speech to the hapless
local bureaucrats disseminating it, they also pointed to a real defect in the
management of public opinion. What made it so difficult for these organi-
zations to pre-empt dissent, or at least to quash it at the earliest sign? One
answer is that many of those who could usually be relied on to enforce the
party line were themselves embroiled in criticism (kritika) and self-criticism
(samokritika) as they grappled with genuine feelings of shock and outrage.
Additionally, local authorities were often simply at a loss as to how to clas-
sify, and then to discipline, the range of responses to de-Stalinization. The
variety of terms used to describe criticisms of the system in local reports –
from ‘anti-social moods’ and ‘anti-Soviet statements’ to ‘slander’ (kleveta),
and ‘demagogic’ (demagogicheskii), ‘hostile’ (vrazhdebnyi) or ‘incorrect’
(nepravil’nyi) statements – partly reflected the habit of combining several
terms of abuse to describe wrongdoers.44 However, it also demonstrated
the local authorities’ predicament: in trying to describe the problems which
had arisen, they were faced with a situation where, in Maria Zezina’s apt
formulation, ‘the boundaries of the permitted were blurred’.45
Comparing party reports from different regions yields a diverse range
of assessments of some of the most common controversial reactions. The
frequent comparisons made between Stalinist and Tsarist times, to the
detriment of the Soviet era, would in some places be deemed incorrect,46
whilst in others such sentiments counted, more seriously, as ‘demagogic’.47
Allegations that the speech had come too late usually counted as ‘incor-
rect’, or ‘misguided’, but were sometimes suppressed more forcefully.48
Party authorities also had a variety of approaches to the frequent calls for
Stalin to be excluded from the party, from letting the resolution pass (only
to be stopped at gorkom level), to immediately ‘correcting’ those who
espoused the idea.49 It was usually easier to discern when respondents had
strayed into distinctively anti-Soviet territory, but even in clear cases of
‘anti-Soviet’ or ‘hostile’ reactions, punishment often occurred some time
after the event, with the original meeting failing to put a stop to such senti-
ments. This occurred, for instance, at a meeting of the Stalingrad pedagog-
ical institute, where anti-party statements made by several students were
not rebuffed at the original meeting.50 It was only the intervention of the
gorkom which ensured that students were forced to repent, and received
the appropriate punishment; by this time, however, the incident had
achieved notoriety throughout the oblast’ as an example of the suppres-
sion of criticism (zazhim kritiki).51 This scenario, which also occurred at
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 47
the Thermo-Technical Laboratory, embodied the party’s worst fears, sug-
gesting communities of dissenters, rather than individual rogue voices.
However, in subsequent CC resolutions, such as those on the Thermo-
Technical Laboratory, and the later articles and circulars about the cult,
this same accumulation of critical terms gradually came to reflect a
growing confidence at the centre in asserting the boundaries of public
opinion, defining, and then anathematizing and excluding anti-Soviet
conduct. The language of demonization reverted to its familiar Stalin-era
functions (although now it no longer portended physical annihilation),
emphasizing the party’s firmer stance on dissent. The terminology of
dissent – ‘demagogic’, ‘slanderous’ and ‘anti-Soviet’ – was attached, in the
July resolutions (and other published criticisms of dissent), and in the
secret June circular, to specific culprits and specific types of behaviour.52
Local authorities were told in June that:

Isolated anti-party speeches are not so much dangerous in and of

themselves, but rather the fact that they didn’t receive the necessary
rebuttal, including from leaders . . . The CC draws the attention of
party organizations to the fact that a section of communists doesn’t
understand correctly the freedom of discussion and criticism in the
party, as a result of which they aren’t in a position to discern when
freedom of discussion transgresses the bounds of partiinost’ and criti-
cism becomes slander.53

Having offered this assistance in categorizing dissent, and placed the

focus on the vexed question of otpor, the central authorities now placed
responsibility for the containment of dissent firmly with the local authori-
ties. Dissent certainly did not cease as a result of these secret circulars and
published documents. However, reports of anti-Soviet and demagogic
responses monitored at meetings about the cult (including meetings held
to discuss the July resolution) recounted a growing number of successful
cases of expulsion or decisive punishment of wrongdoers.54
At the same time, it was precisely the premature silence that descended
on the Stalin question which piqued curiosity. Students and young people
became, if anything, more vociferous in their interrogations of the komso-
mol authorities after the Hungarian crisis; the authorities reported
despairingly in November that student curiosity about the cult had only
increased since the party had tried to curtail debate by enforcing discipli-
nary measures and delineating a more balanced view of Stalin’s charac-
ter.55 The party circulated another warning to dissenters, mentioning youth
in particular, at the end of 1956. The language of the circular again
reflected the confidence with which denunciatory terminology was now
employed; dissenters were ‘rotten’ (gnilye), ‘hostile’ (vrazhdebnye) and
‘petty bourgeois’.56 Meanwhile, ‘communists and leaders’ were also at fault
because ‘they don’t decisively put an end to anti-Soviet propaganda, don’t
48 Polly Jones
repudiate hostile outbursts, and trail along in the wake of incidents’.57 As a
result of the fall-out from the Secret Speech, the party rapidly learned to
anathematize dissent, retreating to familiar Stalinist discourses and strat-
egies of social exclusion. However, the full restoration of order was slower
to be achieved.

Policing de-Stalinization: iconoclasm and criminality

The violence of de-Stalinization in 1956 was not merely verbal; physical
violence against the symbols of Stalinism was also exceptionally wide-
spread. Even in the chaotic weeks which followed the Secret Speech, many
witnesses looked to proximate authorities to provide clarity and stability,
peppering the local and central authorities with requests for guidelines.
For instance, one question submitted to the authorities in Stalingrad
enquired, ‘are people acting correctly in tearing portraits of Stalin?’ and,
more specifically, ‘did they act correctly in the Zelenovskii farm, knocking
down a monument to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, will someone be sub-
jected to punishment for this?’.58 In Leningrad, meanwhile, ‘iconoclasm’
was to be found higher up: one listener asked the visiting historian,
Pankratova, whether ‘people are behaving correctly in the party raikoms,
where they have first of all taken down Stalin portraits. Were there CC
instructions about this?’.59 Finally, party authorities were themselves per-
plexed, asking for guidance in ‘how to act in those circumstances when
workers themselves take down portraits of Stalin[?]’.60 It would take some
time for these answers to emerge. Such actions were located on a shifting
boundary between mobilized emotion and uncontrolled, disorderly pas-
sions.
The fact that many of these actions were public and demonstrative sug-
gests that their perpetrators saw them as their entitlement, if not as their
duty to the party. The interpretation of iconoclasm as a ‘duty’ could be
seen at a meeting of the Odessa sailing school Party organization, where
one member eagerly announced to the secretary that, ‘this very day
[segodnia zhe], I’ll throw all the portraits of Stalin out of the apartment’.61
Meanwhile, people frequently asserted their ‘rights’ to dispose of visible
signs of Stalin. At Moscow’s ‘Frezer’ factory, for instance, ‘the inhabitants
of one room took down the portrait of Stalin and gave it to the supervisor,
saying ‘take it away, it is no longer needed by us’.62 Schoolchildren in
Moscow took down a Stalin portrait and put it away in a cupboard,
explaining to their teacher that ‘Stalin committed many mistakes in his
work, and for that reason they had taken down his portrait’.63 A similarly
defiant act was recorded in Lvov oblast’, Ukraine, where an old Commu-
nist, Utkin, was lying ill in bed at the time when the Secret Speech was
publicized. Upon learning of the speech, the report records – ‘[he] got up
out of bed, took down the picture of Stalin from the wall, put it in the
corner and warned his wife never to hang the portrait again’.64 Such
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 49
‘private’ acts of de-Stalinization were, apparently, left unopposed, perhaps
because they were thought to constitute reasonable responses to the reve-
lations of the speech.
However, where these acts were more public, or ‘demonstrative’,65 the
party was less sure, haunted by the thought that these acts could be dan-
gerous, subversive acts threatening public order and the Soviet system as a
whole. The emerging tendency to criminalize such acts paralleled and rein-
forced the party’s emerging definition of anti-Soviet verbal responses.
People often reacted to the Secret Speech across the RSFSR and most of
the USSR (except Georgia) by breaking, tearing and assaulting Stalin pic-
tures and statues in factories, schools, squares and a variety of other public
institutions. Statues were knocked down, beheaded, defaced or daubed in
paint, and portraits were removed, ripped, graffitied or burned.66 One
interpretive paradigm brought to bear on these acts by anxious local
authorities was that of spontaneous, ‘elemental’ behaviour (stikhiinost’).
One report from Kalinin, for example, recounted that ‘at some enterprises
and collective farms and institutions and schools, people have started to
take down Stalin portraits spontaneously [stikhiino]’.67 In a similar vein,
the authorities in Vladimir oblast’ reported that in a factory in Gus’-
Khrustal’nyi, at the meeting to discuss the Secret Speech:

Some workers were allowed to engage in spontaneous removal [samo-

vol’noe sniatie] of Stalin portraits and bas-reliefs from the honour
board. In the ‘Red Labour’ artel’, a Stalin portrait was taken down by
non-party member Bratskii, and burned in the stove.68

This report was mirrored in other reports of workers spontaneously dis-

posing of portraits, or abusing them in the aftermath of meetings.69 In most
cases, the emphasis on ‘spontaneity’ or emotion was ambiguous, suggest-
ing on the one hand an excusable venting of emotion by people not ‘con-
scious’ enough to know any better, and, on the other, the fear that such
acts could portend a more serious breakdown of social order. The latter
concerns were voiced less ambiguously by individuals who imagined them-
selves to be above such behaviour, such as Moscow academics (who asked
‘why didn’t the CC foresee the anarchic actions by the masses [nizy]?’)70
and observers deploring the anti-Stalin violence in schools.71
What, then, was the solution? If iconoclasts could be made to see the
error of their ways, to move from ‘spontaneity to consciousness’, the
damage could usually be contained. For instance, when a senior technician
at the firm ‘Tokhogres’ in Lvov ‘tore a Stalin portrait off the wall, tore it
up and threw it in the rubbish bin’, he was rebuked by the factory
manager. However, when he ‘begged forgiveness for his act, and said that
he could not calmly react to Stalin’s anti-party actions’, punishment went
no further.72 His response indicated that his act was only a temporary
aberration, grounded in a (justifiable) outrage against Stalin’s wrongdoing.
50 Polly Jones
However, the barrage of violent incidents soon swept away this
emphasis on forgiveness, and notions of hooliganism and criminality
started to creep into party discourse about iconoclasm. Perhaps, this viol-
ence was, as the academics had warned, ‘anarchic’, deserving punishment
rather than indulgence. In April 1956, one report from around the Union
noted that in the aftermath of the Secret Speech, ‘there had taken place
many incidents of public destruction of portraits, busts and monuments of
Stalin, which went as far as overt hooliganism in many cases’.73 The
particular incidents singled out for attention included book and portrait
burning (Tallinn), a hammer attack on a bust of Stalin outside Brest public
library, and an incident in Petrozavodsk, where the face of a Stalin statue
had been smeared with paint.74 This choice of representative incidents
perhaps reflected the fear that anti-social behaviour in these marginal
territories would be contagious, seeping into the heart of the Union
(although in fact it had taken hold at the centre as strongly as at the
periphery).
One of the first cases to be criminalized concerned two roving icono-
clasts, a pair of drunken Lithuanian soldiers, who on their way to
Leningrad, ‘had removed from its pedestal and smashed a clay bust of
Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, by the city’s dramatic theatre’. Apprehended
by the police, the report concluded, ‘the hooligans were arrested and
investigated’.75 The sailors had clearly transgressed a number of rules, by
being drunk and assaulting public property in a town they did not even
inhabit, but the case is noteworthy as one of the first indications of a shift
from excusing violence toward criminalizing it. Another example of this
transition was the case of a group of schoolchildren in Belgorod who were
responsible for ‘a manifestation of hooligan activity, when, on the evening
of 1 April, during a showing of a film by young people and pupils of the
school the head of a bust of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin standing in the
square opposite the school, was knocked off with stones’.76 The fact that
young people, rather than the town authorities, were responsible for this
act transformed potentially innocent iconoclasm into an ominous sign of
the breakdown of social order. These deviant youths, placing themselves
in opposition to the ‘good’ youth of the town, were doubly deserving of
the epithet of ‘hooligan’; using the ‘pretext’ of de-Stalinization, they had
smuggled deviant social norms into a space intended for their education
and edification, just as anti-Soviet feeling had seeped into party meetings
‘in the guise of’ (pod vidom/predlogom) criticism of Stalin.77
By November 1956, as the party celebrated the first anniversary of the
revolution to fall after the Secret Speech, there was no longer any leniency
shown to those who assaulted any Soviet symbolism. Violence did not
abate in honour of November 1956, but now, if the perpetrators could be
caught, they were harshly punished, as is demonstrated by an incident at
an electrical factory in Chuvashiia.78 In November, a non-member of the
party named Zolotov cut the head off a Stalin sculpture in the factory
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 51
courtyard, describing his actions as ‘the struggle against the cult of person-
ality’. Unlike the party, however, Zolotov also alleged that the dictator-
ship of the proletariat had died out under Stalin and that bourgeois ideas
had been allowed to take the place of Marxist–Leninist theory. Zolotov
was subsequently condemned by the factory Party organization and by a
general meeting, and was arrested on the charge of ‘political hooliganism’.
His actions, even more explicitly than those of the Belgorod schoolchild-
ren, combined unsanctioned violence and political views, in this case
verging on Trotskyism, which the party had anathematized as early as
summer 1956. The shift from ‘correcting’ iconoclasts to viewing them as
potential ‘enemies’, whose violent acts portended violent intentions to
the Soviet system, again set a trend in the management of reactions to de-
Stalinization which would resurface when the party returned to the Stalin
theme in 1961.

The 22nd Party Congress: suppressing dissent?

The 22nd Party Congress (1961) was primarily intended to advance
Khrushchev’s vision of communism. After the tumultuous revelations of
the 20th Party Congress, and the political in-fighting of the anti-party
group episode (1957) and the 21st Party Congress (1959), the party badly
needed to present its vision of the future, unencumbered by fresh revela-
tions about its sordid past. Yet the palpable optimism which was promoted
in Soviet public life in 1961, during the discussions preceding the ratifica-
tion of the Third Party Programme, carried an undertow of pessimism.79
The past had its part to play in the 22nd Party Congress, not merely in
terms of the pure Leninist traditions which the new programme would
embody, but also in terms of the ‘unfinished business’ of the Stalinist past.
Discussions of the Third Party Programme provoked some suggestions
from ordinary people that the programme itself ought to contain a clear
statement of the party’s position on the cult of personality, indicating that,
for some at least, the issue had not been satisfactorily resolved.80
The congress therefore returned forcefully to the Stalin theme. The
congress concluded with an orgy of criticism of Stalin, which acted as a
well-orchestrated crescendo toward the final symbolic act of iconoclasm,
the removal of Stalin’s body from the mausoleum on the night of 31
August 1961. It was precisely this kind of overt, easily interpreted, public
condemnation of Stalin, and iconoclasm of his cult, which earlier texts and
symbolic gestures of de-Stalinization had lacked. Yet how was this, appar-
ently more iconoclastic, wave of de-Stalinization received by its wider
audience? And how far was ‘spontaneous’ iconoclasm to be tolerated in
this final stage of public response to the revelations about Stalin?
In fact, the 22nd Congress both provided and enforced a far more stable
image of Stalin, and of popular response to de-Stalinization. The congress,
and subsequent materials about it in the central press, provided a very
52 Polly Jones
extensive public text about Stalin, which also contained a much clearer
guide to suitable responses for listeners. Moral outrage (vozmushchenie)81
was encouraged, to dispel any remaining doubts about Stalin (or de-
Stalinization), dissolving them in a wave of cathartic emotion.
Khrushchev’s concluding speech to the congress, for instance, encouraged
the people to take revenge on Stalin:

Any leader who forgets this pays a harsh price for such errors. I
should say – pays during his life, or the people will not forgive him
after his death, as happened with the condemnation of Stalin’s cult of
personality.82

These guidelines for the new role to be played by the people (narod)
encouraged posthumous and passionate criticism of Stalin, which would
not, unlike in 1956, be reversed or retracted. Let me now turn to the ques-
tion of how successful these texts about Stalin were in controlling local dis-
course about de-Stalinization.

Replicating de-Stalinization
Where, in 1956, the party had been cautious in encouraging popular narra-
tives of Terror, discussions at party meetings in the wake of the 22nd Party
Congress made such ‘memory work’ obligatory. Now, local narratives
about instances of the ‘cult of personality’ – its local perpetrators and
victims – formed an integral part of the performance of the final act of de-
Stalinization.83 ‘Old Communists’ and rehabilitated survivors of the Terror
played a far more prominent role in the dissection of the Stalin era at a
local level, just as they had during the congress itself. At the same time, by
assigning leading roles to party members of long standing, or to current
local party leaders, these meetings reflected the hierarchy which still gov-
erned the narration of terror.
For example, at the meeting of Kostroma obkom, held in mid-
November, one of the keynote pronouncements was given by a member of
more than forty years standing, who remembered that ‘many Bolsheviks,
underground conspirators and komsomol workers were subjected to
repressions and destroyed during the cult of personality. It was a gloomy
time’.84 Like the congress itself, where Khrushchev and his fellow leaders
had recounted the fates of purged Politburo members, and republic
leaders had echoed them, narrating their local experience of terror, meet-
ings also tended to publicize the unjust fates of local party leaders. In Tula,
it was revealed that some 24 figures from the local party organization had
been arrested, and 22 shot, during the Terror.85 In North Ossetia, an indus-
trial manger recounted his own sufferings in 1937 and further tales of high-
ranking party figures who had been ‘groundlessly’ repressed.86 In
Volgograd, at the meeting of the oblast’ aktiv, several old communists
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 53
recounted their sufferings at the hands of the Stalin regime.87 The ‘keynote
address’ highlighted in the report about this meeting sent to the central
authorities was delivered by Stepaniatov, a member since 1918, who
recounted that ‘I was made to experience a lot of sorrow, and to spend a
long time in prison during this cult’; this involved being arrested while
serving as head of the city soviet in 1938, being imprisoned due to the ‘law-
lessness’ of Stalin and his cronies, and then exiled to Siberia. The fact that
Stepaniatov had survived and been rehabilitated allowed him and his
fellow survivors to act as ideal vehicles for de-Stalinization. Possessing
both the moral authority to condemn the cult from personal experience,
and yet also happier memories of the pre-Stalinist party, and their ‘pre-
Stalinized’ city, they represented the ideal discursive nexus from which to
condemn the past and anticipate the de-Stalinized future.
These carefully orchestrated narratives of Terror by old Bolsheviks
emphasized that passionate moral outrage was now an acceptable and
indeed the only appropriate, response to the cult. As such, resistance to
de-Stalinization was usually coded as a form of emotional and intellectual
immaturity. The meeting of the Traktorozavodskii raikom, in Stalingrad/
Volgograd, was full of eyewitness and victim testimony, offered as a
reproach, and further propaganda lesson, to those who resisted the fight
against the cult, particularly those young, naïve inhabitants who had not
yet renounced their feelings for Stalin.88

Responding to de-Stalinization
The greater concordance between central and local texts of de-
Stalinization described above represented a considerable advance on the
chaos sown by the Secret Speech. However, it constituted only one sector
of the response aroused by the congress. Other important forms of
response to party policy were questions submitted to party meetings, and
letters sent to the party leadership.
In contrast to the thousands of questions concerning Stalin which rained
down on the heads of party officials in the wake of the Secret Speech, the
Stalin question evoked much less confusion, and even interest, in 1961.89 In
Sverdlovsk, for instance, questions about the 22nd Party Congress submit-
ted to raion authorities showed far more curiosity about the apparent con-
troversies involving China and Albania, and the fate of the anti-party
group, than about Stalin.90 If any sentiment about Stalin could be gleaned
from these notes, it was a sense of impatience that the party continued to
hark back to the question of Stalin’s cult, or more often, to the anti-party
group.91 There were almost none of the kind of probing questions about
culpability which had so troubled the authorities in 1956. A listener who
enquired ‘why the members of the Central Committee had not fought
against Stalin’s cult during his life’ was a lone voice; the reduced number of
questions about Stalin either reflected a relative lack of interest in the issue,
54 Polly Jones
or, as one note pointed out, may have indicated that the congress had dis-
pelled any remaining confusion (neiasnosti).92 In Stalingrad, on the other
hand, a greater diversity of opinion was reported, perhaps linked to the
controversy over changing the city’s name. The population of Stalingrad
had many questions about the cult of personality, asking how it had arisen,
and why Stalin had been praised for so long (‘Stalin’s name was praised,
they sang him dithyrambs, raised him up on to the pedestal of an idolized
leader [kumir-vozhd’], but now we’re . . . toppling him from his pedestal’).93
Criticism of Stalin here also targeted specific failings of Stalin’s character,
claiming, inter alia, that Stalin had a ‘mania for greatness’ and ‘lack of
humanity’.94 None of these criticisms necessarily outstripped those of the
congress, but the claims, echoing those of 1956, that the party had hypocrit-
ically praised Stalin for its own benefit certainly did.95
Letters sent to the authorities after the 22nd Party Congress, on the
other hand, as in 1956, usually came from more impassioned correspon-
dents with a particular emotional stake in the Stalin question. In 1956,
these had been dominated by fervent supporters of Stalin who leapt to his
defence, penning angry diatribes to Central Committee members.96 In
1961, on the other hand, letters to the authorities usually expressed pas-
sionate gratitude for the new revelations about Stalin, suggesting a cathar-
tic release of memories and emotions. For, despite its grisly revelations,
‘for the section of Soviet society who counted themselves as anti-Stalinists,
the XXII Congress became a festival for the soul’.97
Several writers refused to identify themselves, not because they feared
party reprisals (as in 1956), but so as, in the words of one person writing
anonymously to Pravda in November 1961, to avoid giving the impression
that they harboured ‘self-interested aims’.98 For these writers, there was
apparently a qualitative difference between the semi-secret, and ultimately
half-hearted, condemnations of Stalin in 1956, and the public, dramatic
performance of the party’s tragic past that had just taken place at the 22nd
Congress. According to reports sent to the Central Committee, relatives of
Stalin’s victims formed a large proportion of those who wrote letters to
Pravda during this time.99 Khrushchev’s assertion in his concluding speech
that ‘every person represents a whole story’ was borne out in the mini-
biographies which emerged from these letters.100
One woman writing from Alma-Ata, for instance, was overcome by
emotion upon hearing Khrushchev speak at the 22nd Congress:

When I heard Khrushchev’s concluding speech on the radio, I couldn’t

hold back my tears. Involuntarily, the image of 1937 rose before my
eyes, that terrible year when my children and I were deprived of a
father, a husband.101

Her testimony suggests that it was only the party’s public performance
of this narrative of the Terror which could legitimize and release her own
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 55
private memories; the correspondence between the state’s historical
narrative and her long-suppressed personal history was traumatic, yet also
validating.
This sense of the ‘authorization’ of personal history could also be found
in another letter, from a Muscovite, who wrote of his own personal
tragedy, the loss of his father in 1945 after his arrest (he was subsequently
posthumously rehabilitated in 1957).102 The conference’s proceedings had
not led to understanding: ‘I’m agitated and outraged by the fact that the
best people in the party and state were destroyed en masse’. However, this
subsumption of his father’s death into a larger countrywide (or party-
wide) narrative of unjust sacrifice, in which ‘the best’ had fallen victim to
mass terror, did allow the writer to feel like a ‘legitimate citizen’ (polno-
pravnyi grazhdanin). The author went on to praise Khrushchev’s promises
to construct a monument to the victims of the Terror, vowing that he
would ‘try to be one of the first to place flowers at the base of that monu-
ment’. Again, the inclusion of the writer’s personal history, for so long a
source of shame and social exclusion, into a collective ritual (and site) of
remembrance was a highly emotional experience.103 The public revelations
about Stalin therefore went some way to expanding the boundaries of
inclusion in the Soviet public, confirming once and for all the rehabilita-
tion of Stalin’s victims. However, beyond expressing gratitude and
outrage, what was the imagined role of the Soviet public in the process of
de-Stalinization? It emerged that the limits on popular participation in de-
Stalinization were quite draconian.
The de-Stalinization of the symbolism of the Stalin cult, in contrast to
the half-hearted ‘official’ iconoclasm of 1956, was thorough, eliminating
every trace of Stalin’s physical and textual presence. However, the violent
reactions of 1956 had no counterpart in 1961. The removal of Stalin’s body
from the mausoleum provided the earliest template for this wave of the
‘overcoming of the cult of personality’: participation in the verbal demoli-
tion of Stalin was welcome, even encouraged, but the physical demolition
of Stalinist memory sites remained the preserve of a small elite, who
accomplished their task secretly and swiftly.104 The congress’ calls for
Stalin’s body to be removed from the mausoleum, framed in discourses of
(in)compatibility and sanctity, were echoed in indignant appeals for
removal in regional meetings. At Kostroma obkom, the ‘popular desire’
for Stalin to be removed was publicly staged in the reading out of a letter
calling for Stalin to be removed as an ‘unworthy’ neighbour for Lenin, in
an echo of Dora Lazurkina’s climactic speech to the congress.105 At a
meeting of the Kaliningrad town Party organization, one timber worker
claimed – ‘Stalin all his life taught us to live in a Leninist way, but himself
violated Lenin’s commandments. There is no place for him next to
Lenin!’.106 A report on reactions in Tula oblast’ described worker approval
of the removal of Stalin from the ‘holy of holies of our party and people –
the mausoleum of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin’.107 Nevertheless, popular desires
56 Polly Jones
to find out more about the implementation of this decision went unsatis-
fied; a question submitted to the Volgograd oblast’ aktiv meeting after the
burial, asking whether Stalin had been cremated or buried received the
curt reply, ‘they buried him in a grave’.108 Similarly, party meetings saw
impassioned calls for the removal of Stalin’s monuments, but those
present were never informed how these removals had taken place, much
less invited to take part in these rituals. Consequently, numerous anec-
dotes, and occasional questions sent to the authorities, either wondered
how statues had been taken down, or asked why this so often took place
after dark.109
Some letters to the authorities accordingly seemed content to enact
verbal iconoclasm, leaving its physical enactment up to the party bosses:
violent urges were sublimated into violent prose. A letter from Bashkiriia
sent to Pravda just after the 22nd Congress exemplified this sense of self-
restraint:

[Stalin’s] monuments, sculptures, busts, portraits pop up everywhere

. . . in our little town their cold stones stick out all over the place,
causing revulsion amongst the oil-workers and all the good people of
our town. Now it’s no longer possible to look at Stalin without feelings
of repulsion – the principal culprit of all those disgusting deeds, the
principal culprit for human grief, it’s impossible to pronounce the
names of the cities linked to his awful name, without calling to mind
all his evil deeds, which went on for decades. All of them must be re-
named as a matter of urgency, so that Stalin’s name no longer poisons
the life of our Soviet people.110

The melodramatic fervour, faced with the spectacle of Stalin’s con-

tinued presence, was purely textual. Despite the visceral evocations of
nausea, the author turned to the authorities to relieve the sickness of con-
fronting the (signs of the) past, rather than acting himself.
This sense of the limits on individual agency could also be found in a
letter from Kharkov:

The people will remember Stalin well enough without the monuments
that he erected to himself during his lifetime . . . the people gave him
authority, and now they’ll take it back . . . the people say: ‘Stalin’s
death saved Russia!’111

This letter represented the destruction of Stalinist symbols as a popular

act of demotion and punishment; it would symbolize the refusal to accord
the memory of Stalin the respect necessary to sustain a cult. The letter
evidently viewed the new wave of de-Stalinization as a complete reversal
in official attitudes, for it openly revealed to the authorities the former,
and formerly outlawed, discourse of popular dissent against Stalin by
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 57
updating the impudent re-writings of the ‘SSSR’ acronym, from the 1930s
version (smert’ Stalina spaset Rossiiu) to the posthumous version
(. . . spasla . . .).112 The letter presented a text of popular iconoclasm
intended to prompt those in power to authorize an act of iconoclasm.
Thus, although there were few restrictions on the iconoclastic fervour that
it was possible to express verbally, the authorities remained in charge of
iconoclastic actions.

Resisting de-Stalinization
Whilst verbal participation in the final wave of de-Stalinization was
encouraged, therefore, physical participation was discouraged. Yet what of
those who wanted neither type of participation: was resistance to de-
Stalinization permitted? The available evidence suggests that open resis-
tance to de-Stalinization in 1961 and after was far less prevalent than it
had been in 1956. There are several possible explanations for this. First,
the 22nd Congress’ revelations about Stalin, for all that they did represent
a qualitatively new step for some respondents (including the letter writers
examined earlier), in no way approached the ‘shock therapy’ of the Secret
Speech.113 Second, the revelations of 1961 differed markedly from those in
the Secret Speech. Unlike the Secret Speech, the speeches of the 22nd
Party Congress and the subsequent reports in the Soviet press provided a
coherent narrative of Stalinism, which dispensed with the moral ambiguity
of the Secret Speech and couched key facts about Stalin within clear inter-
pretive guidelines for its listeners. Lastly, the greater clarity with which the
Stalin question was posed may indeed have meant that supporters of
Stalin ‘under the force of the new revelations about Stalin at the congress
were forced to fall silent’.114 Thus, outrage and confusion, the dominant
tendencies in responses in 1956, were less likely either to arise, or to be
expressed. Nevertheless, this did not preclude certain instances of resis-
tance, and these provide further insights into the party’s paradoxically
repressive response to dissent.
The decision on the mausoleum was the touch-paper which ignited
much of the disapproval of the party’s course expressed in 1961. A report
from the Moscow oblast’, written after the issue of the mausoleum had
been discussed, but before the decree had been carried out, for example,
recounted several workers’ objections to the plans, with one saying that –
’Stalin’s ashes [sic] should be taken to another place, but with a sense of
respect, since after all he has great merits’.115 There were also, perhaps
predictably, reports of dissatisfaction in Georgia, Chechnia and Dagestan,
where certain people still thought that Stalin’s merits meant that he should
remain in the mausoleum.116 The Georgian Central Committee reported
individual instances of resistance, involving Georgian soldiers in an
artillery batallion.117 There were also reports of unrest amongst the youth
of Georgia.118 Some kept quiet, out of a sense of expediency, with one
58 Polly Jones
student in Batumi, probably recalling the 1956 crackdown, claiming
revealingly that ‘people are hardly going to speak out against such a
decision’. Others were less cowed – anonymous notices were found in
Tbilisi’s university campus, calling for protests on 31 October, and on the
revolution anniversary. However, at least some of this pro-Stalin senti-
ment extended beyond Stalin’s homeland: according to Western press
reports at the time, and more recent sociological data, the issue of the
mausoleum produced some surprisingly frank and open debate which
revealed a wide spectrum of views on the removal.119
Renaming was the other ritual of de-Stalinization which aroused at
times quite serious popular discontent. The party’s disingenuous calls for
‘discussion and approval’ of name changes inadvertently provided a forum
within which the iconoclastic discourse and actions of de-Stalinization
could be criticized.120 In Georgia, workers at enterprises renamed so that
they no longer bore Stalin’s name were described as harbouring ‘senti-
ments directed against re-naming’.121 This kind of concern was also to be
found in other, less predictable places, however. In Perm’ oblast’, at a mid-
November meeting of a cell of a postal factory in the city to discuss (or
rather, to consent to) removing Stalin’s name from the factory’s title, the
deputy director of the cell, a certain Petrov, disagreed with the idea of
renaming, ‘and proposed leaving the old name, justifying this by the fact
that under Stalin’s cult of personality, workers had been better fed’.122 His
contention received the support of two other technicians, and all three
opponents were not sufficiently rebuked. In the vote on renaming, 19 sup-
ported it, but there were 14 protest votes and 17 abstentions. The factory
authorities then held another meeting, evidently taking Petrov aside in the
interim, since he then repented of his behaviour at the second meeting.
Responding to the signal that dissent on the matter of de-Stalinization was
not to be tolerated, the participants of the second meeting unanimously
signed up to the factory’s resolution to rename the factory after Sverdlov,
and the matter was closed. Lastly, in Stalingrad, the decision to rename
the city met with widespread objections, based both on continued respect
for Stalin, and also – more commonly – on protest against the disrespect
for history and local memories and traditions which the name change
implied. This protest was quelled using a number of methods, including
forceful propaganda, such as meetings where protesters were forced to
listen to gruesome tales of the Terror, and the curtailment of ‘votes’ on
renaming if protest looked likely to derail the vote, as happened at the
city’s Pedagogical Institute.123

Conclusion
The Secret Speech marked a radically new stage in de-Stalinization. Not
only did it debunk much of the hitherto canonical history of Stalinism,
propagated by the Short Course and the Stalin cult, but it also generated
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 59
an unprecedented crisis in the management of public opinion. Whilst criti-
cisms of Stalin made in 1956 were largely retracted in the period between
the 20th and 22nd Party Congress, leaving his public image ill-defined, the
party permitted no such uncertainty on the issue of public opinion and
dissent, asserting its prerogatives to define and punish dissent with
growing confidence from late Spring 1956.
Therefore, when the party returned to de-Stalinization in 1961, bringing
the critique of the Secret Speech into the open, and elaborating on some
of its revelations, the real purpose of the latter stage of the campaign was
not to destabilize further the old imagery of Stalin, but rather to stabilize
popular opinion about the erstwhile leader, and about his successors’ pol-
icies of de-Stalinization. Having learned a hard lesson from the previous
phase of de-Stalinization, the authorities provided and enforced a clearer
script about Stalin. Criticisms were more open, but discussion was closed
off, and dissenting voices were silenced more forcefully than in 1956.
Although the aftermath of the 22nd Party Congress saw some further de-
Stalinization – more open critiques of Stalin, and some new narratives
about the Terror – this remained at the discretion of the party, who, even
in this context, still preferred to use the elliptical short-hand, kul’t
lichnosti, implying that the issue had been closed for discussion, just as the
party had ‘overcome the past’ to move to the glorious future. The party’s
commitment to opening up the discussion of the past had been superficial
and short-lived; it would be left to dissident historians and writers to con-
tinue these explorations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Notes
1 Still one of the best accounts of the changing official views of Stalin, a topic
outside the scope of this chapter, is S. Cohen, ‘The Stalin Question since
Stalin’, in Id., Rethinking the Soviet Experience. Politics and History since
1917, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 93–127.
2 These observations about the contrasts in public opinion between 1956 and
1961 can be compared with a similar argument concerning rehabilitation and
punishment (M. Dobson, ‘Sign-Posting the Future, or Reconstructing Old
Divisions?: A Re-assessment of the XXII Party Congress’, unpublished MS,
paper to the 35th convention of the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Slavic Studies, Toronto, November 2003).
3 Terms from Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststalinskoe obshchestvo: problemy
liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow, 1999, p. 91, and Vol’noe ekonomich-
eskoe obshchestvo Rossii, Kruglyi stol, ‘40 let zakrytogo doklada N.S.
Khrushcheva XX s’’ezdu O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh’ 24.2.96,
Moscow, 1996.
4 A. Adzhubei, Te desiat’ let, Moscow: Interbuk, p. 127.
5 See chapter by Roger Markwick in this volume.
6 The literature on reactions to the speech is extensive, see e.g. Doklad N.S.
Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX se’’zde KPSS. Dokumenty,
Moscow: Rosspen, 2002; Iu. Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’ in
A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev, W. Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven:
60 Polly Jones
Yale University Press, 2000; P. Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism: De-
mythologising Stalin, 1953–1956’, in Shukman, H. (ed.), Redefining Stalinism,
London: Frank Cass, 2003.
7 RGANI, 1/2/17/89-91; RGANI, 3/14/4/66.
8 Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina, pp. 165–255; Analysis of
these documents in Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, ‘O podgotovke zakrytogo
doklada N.S. Khrushcheva XX s’’ezdu KPSS v svete novykh dokumentov’,
Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2, 2002, 107–18; N. Khrushchev, Vremia, liudi,
vlast’ vospominaniia, Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 176–94.
9 For a full analysis of the speech’s rhetoric, see P. Jones, ‘Strategies of De-
Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism. A Comparison of
De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation’, DPhil diss., University of Oxford,
2003, pp. 52–63.
10 RGANI, 1/2/18/3-90.
11 RGANI, 5/32/43/62.
12 Reabilitatsiia. Kak eto bylo, vol. 2, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, p. 22.
13 Ibid., pp. 22, 46.
14 RGANI, 5/32/43/73.
15 RGANI, 5/31/53/101.
16 Reabilitatsiia, p. 38; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/43/54; RGANI,
5/32/43/145.
17 Reabilitatsiia, p. 22.
18 RGANI, 5/3/43/8.
19 RGANI, 5/32/45/18.
20 Reabilitatsiia, p. 23.
21 RGANI, 5/32/46/8; Ibid., 5/32/44/51, 59, 60; RGANI, 5/32/44/175; RGANI,
5/32/43/91. Additional examples of sentiments about the mausoleum in
Reabilitatsiia, pp. 173–5.
22 RGANI, 5/32/43/133; RGANI, 5/32/43/89; RGASPI, 556/1/25/255.
23 Speeches highlighting old Bolsheviks’ Leninism include RGANI, 5/32/44/17;
RGANI, 5/32/44/50.
24 TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/54-8.
25 RGANI, 5/32/45/60.
26 TsDNIVO, 119/20/41/83-4.
27 TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/58.
28 Reabilitatsiia, p. 35; RGANI, 5/32/46/110.
29 Reabilitatsiia, p. 47; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/44/188.
30 K. Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1981, pp. 15–24.
31 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 52–7, 63–5, 47–9.
32 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 41–3, 45–52, 49. For more on these cases, see Pikhoia, Sovet-
skii soiuz: istoriia vlasti, Moscow, 1998, pp. 147–53, the earliest analysis of the
documents from the Presidential Archive now re-printed in Reabilitatsiia. C.f.
V. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada, N.S. Krushcheva na XX s’’ezde
KPSS’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 4, 1996, 147–68. F. Burlatskii, F., Vozhdi i
sovetniki. O Khrushcheve, Andropove i ne tol’ko o nikh, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
politicheskoi literatury, 1990, p. 98.
33 RGANI, 5/32/45/3-4; RGANI, 5/32/45/54; c.f. TsDOOSO, 4/55/120/13.
34 Reabilitatsiia., p. 48; c.f. RGANI, 5/32/44/1.
35 RGASPI, 566/1/124/57, 156.
36 RGANI, 5/32/43/43. Full stenogram in RGASPI, 556/1/362 (Speeches at ll.
60–2, 69, 90).
37 RGASPI, 556/1/1072/148, 163.
38 RGANI, 5/32/44/135-7.
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 61
39 RGANI, 5/32/45/135-6.
40 RGANI, 5/32/44/134-5.
41 RGANI, 5/32/44/137.
42 RGANI, 5/32/46/176.
43 RGANI, 5/32/46/171.
44 Reabilitatsiia, p. 47.
45 M. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: ot 1953-go k 1956 godu’, Otechestvennaia
istoriia, no. 2, 1995, 121–35 (129).
46 RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 63–4.
47 RGANI, 5/32/45/113.
48 RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 68, 181; RGANI, 5/32/46/8.
49 RGANI, 5/31/54/6; RGANI, 5/31/54/6.
50 TsDNIVO, 594/1/15.
51 TsDNIVO, 113/52/20/284-85.
52 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 157–62.
53 Ibid., p. 158.
54 RGANI, 5/31/54/13-21; RGANI, 5/32/46/244.
55 TsKHDMO, 1/32/810/10-17.
56 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 208–14.
57 Ibid., p. 210.
58 TsDNIVO, 113/52/103/164, 196; the attack on the statue was deemed
‘unhealthy’ by the Stalingrad authorities: TsDNIVO, 113/52/110/9.
59 RGANI, 5/16/746/108.
60 RGANI, 5/31/54/8.
61 RGANI, 5/31/54/60.
62 TsKhDMO, 1/32/810/12.
63 Reabilitatsiia, p. 40.
64 RGANI, 5/31/53/134.
65 Reabilitatsiia, p. 23.
66 Reabilitatsiia, p. 39; RGANI, 5/32/43/153; RGANI, 5/32/46/58.
67 RGANI, 5/32/45/38. C.f. Reabilitatsiia, p. 47.
68 RGANI, 5/32/46/64.
69 RGANI, 5/31/54/127.
70 RGANI, 5/30/139/5.
71 TsKhDMO, 1/32/806/111; RGASPI, 82/2/1470/64.
72 RGANI, 5/31/53/133.
73 RGANI, 5/31/54/6 (my italics).
74 Ibid.
75 RGANI, 5/31/54/127.
76 RGANI, 5/32/43/143.
77 This trope appeared in the July resolution, and also in the periodical press,
e.g. Partiinaia zhizn’, no. 6, 1956, p. 20.
78 RGANI, 5/30/140/194-95. On the anniversary, see RGANI, 5/30/141/67.
79 A. Genis, P. Vail, 60-e: mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, pp.
12, 218; M. Fainsod, ‘The Twenty-Second Party Congress’, in A. Brumberg
(ed.), Russia under Khrushchev. An Anthology from ‘Problems of Commun-
ism’, London: Methuen, 1962, pp. 127–52, esp. pp. 126, 138.
80 RGASPI, 586/1/235/24, 30; Ibid., d. 305, ll. 200–4.
81 ‘The sixties rejected Stalin as an amoral person’, Genis, Vail, 60-e mir
sovetskego cheloveka Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, p. 219.
82 XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, p. 593.
83 Multiple examples in RGANI, 5/32/174 (entire), 175 (entire).
84 RGANI, 5/32/174/68.
85 Ibid., l.135.
62 Polly Jones
86 Ibid., ll.202–3.
87 TsDNIVO, 113/65/76 (entire). C.f. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/16, 23.
88 TsDNIVO, 116/1/603/187.
89 On questions in 1956, an analysis of which lies outside the scope of this
chapter, see Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism’. On 1961 questions, see
general report on USSR, RGANI, 5/32/174/1-10, which recounts that there
were many questions submitted to party meetings after the 22nd Congress, but
most of them concerned the issues outlined below, or outstanding questions
about remaining Stalinist symbolism.
90 TsDOOSO, 161/34/40/10, 15, 20, 42. They were also dominated by the separ-
ate issue of economic hardship (Ibid., ll.10, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26).
91 Ibid., ll.5, 27, 3, 34.
92 Ibid., ll.15, 28. Knowledge accumulation also stressed in Ibid., ll.29–30 (‘until
now there was a lot we didn’t know’).
93 TsDNIVO, 4120/3/172/126.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 P. Jones, ‘ “I’ve held, and I still hold, Stalin in the highest esteem”. Discourses
and Strategies of Resistance to De-Stalinisation in the USSR 1956–62’, in P.
Jones, B. Apor, J. Behrends, A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist
Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, London: Palgrave, 2004.
97 M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev, V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii
politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiia, Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia
entsiklopediia, 1995, p. 223.
98 RGANI, 5/30/173/13; RGASPI, 599/1/183/3.
99 RGANI, 5/30/173/108-19 (svodka of letters to Pravda, compiled 12 November
1961).
100 XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, pp. 585–6.
101 RGANI, 5/30/173/110.
102 Ibid., l.111.
103 C.f. letter praising the idea of a monument (yet also pushing for more de-Stal-
inization) from the Fourth International in Paris, RGASPI, 17/96/16/3-7.
104 Details of burial procedures in RGASPI, 558/11/1487/129; ‘Kreml’ – istoriia v
bolezniakh’, Stolitsa, 1994, no. 41, 11–14; V. Strelkov, ‘Svidetel’stvuiu’, Argu-
menty i fakty, 1988, no. 50, 3.
105 RGANI, 5/32/174/69; XXII s’’ezd, pp. 119–21.
106 RGANI, 5/32/175/84. C.f. RGANI, 5/32/174/69; RGANI, 5/31/160/10.
107 RGANI, 5/32/174/135. C.f. RGANI, 5/31/160/10, 73; RGANI, 5/32/161/98.
108 TsDNIVO, 113/65/76/100.
109 RGANI, 5/32/160/261; RGANI, 5/32/175/206. Anecdotes in Iu. Borev, Fariseia.
Poslestalinskaia epokha v predaniiakh i anekdotakh, Moscow: Konets Veka,
1992, pp. 52–5.
110 RGANI, 5/30/173/117-18.
111 Ibid., l.118.
112 S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and
Dissent, 1934–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 177.
113 Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia’.
114 Gorshkov et al., Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, p. 224.
115 RGANI, 5/31/161/98.
116 RGANI, 5/31/160/13, 42.
117 Ibid., l.56.
118 RGANI, 5/31/60/59.
119 New York Times, 3 November 61, p. 8; c.f. Ibid., 3 November 61, p. 8 and
Ibid., 5 November 61, p. E3; Iu. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel’’ i obshch-
 Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 63
estvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg., Moscow: Rosspen, 2004, pp.
339–41.
120 Renaming resolutions at all levels of the party hierarchy always claimed calls
for renaming had come ‘from below’, and formal meetings were held to
endorse the decision: GARF, 385/17/3702 (Stalinogorsk); GARF, 375/17/3661
(Stalinsk); GARF, 259/42/6770/1-7 (chemical factories formerly named after
Stalin); GAVO, 2115/6/1713/160 (railway station, Stalingrad).
121 RGANI, 5/31/160/42.
122 RGANI, 5/32/175/367.
123 For more details, see P. Jones, ‘De-Stalinising “Stalin’s Town”: Dismantling
the Stalin cult in Stalingrad, 1953–1963’, unpublished MS.
3 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’?
How the Secret Speech was
translated into everyday life1
Susanne Schattenberg

Il’ia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (Ottepel’) contains a significant scene, in

which the chief engineer Egorov is asked by his colleague Brainin about
the fate of their director Zhuravlev, called to Moscow a week earlier.
Egorov replies, ‘They dismissed him, no doubt. I heard that was long
overdue, they were only looking for somebody to replace him’.2 Zhuravlev
and his friends in the local party committee belonged to a generation of
‘formalist’ and ‘cagey’ bureaucrats who did not welcome changes in the
production process. Rather than introducing new inventions in production,
they would start smear campaigns against their engineers, criticizing their
proposals as ‘dangerous adventures’.3 As a contrast to these ‘Zhuravlevs’,
Ehrenburg presented the young engineers, who believed in truth, love,
justice and technical progress.
This constellation, in which the ‘bureaucratic’ official was pitted against
the ‘democratic’ and committed technical specialist, became a common
trope of the Khrushchev era. It was introduced by Ehrenburg’s novel in
1954 and then continued in Pravda in 1956. It served as a parable both of
Stalin’s demise and post-Stalinist political change, and also of the begin-
ning of a new chapter of technical progress and economic growth. But
whilst writers and readers were interested in both the former and the
latter, the party used the bureaucrat vs. engineer formula to try to concen-
trate public discussion on economic matters, and thereby to distract the
public from political debate.
In this chapter it will be argued that the ‘Secret Speech’ constituted a
unique experiment in information policy, carried out by the Party. The
party chose the partial public sphere of local party meetings in factories and
institutes to test out people’s reactions to Khrushchev’s speech. But when
this experiment failed, and threatened to run out of control, the party
restricted the discussion of the ‘personality cult’ and ‘democracy’ to the
traditional Soviet setting: the factory. The new slogans proclaiming ‘initi-
ative of the masses’ and ‘collective leadership’ were used in a campaign to
promote mass inventorship that addressed the rediscovered protagonists,
engineers and inventors. Its sole aim was to increase productivity.
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 65
Disseminating the ‘Secret Speech’
The Secret Speech ‘About the personality cult and its consequences’ read
by Khrushchev to a closed meeting in the early hours of 25 February 1956,
the last night of the 20th Party Congress, was not secret at all.4 It was
not only the nearly 1,400 delegates who spread what they had heard
throughout the country.5 It was the Central Committee itself which
organized the circulation of the Speech. Its decree of 5 March 1956,
the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, ‘About the announcement of
comrade Khrushchev’s Speech “About the personality cult and its con-
sequences” to the 20th Party Congress’ stated that all party committees
of all republics and districts were to be provided with a brochure contain-
ing Khrushchev’s speech, and that this was to be read to factory or insti-
tute collectives, including non-party members.6 Evidently, the party
leaders around Khrushchev wanted the people to know about the condem-
nation of Stalin, and they considered the closed space of a party members’
meeting in a factory or institute to be the right place to start this experi-
ment.7
From 20 March to 23 March, the 20th Party Congress delegate, Central
Committee member and historian Anna Pankratova went on a reading
tour to Leningrad, where she talked nine times in only three days about
the personality cult to nearly 6,000 workers, engineers, scholars and stu-
dents.8 Raisa Orlova recounted that the party secretary took a red
brochure out of his portfolio and announced that the audience was going
to hear Khrushchev’s Speech. After his reading, he left before anybody
could ask questions.9 By 11 April, 35,000 communists in Leningrad had
been informed about the speech, whilst in Rostov and Stalingrad, respec-
tively, some 17,000 and 20,000 had been informed.10 The demand for the
speech was so great that the Kalinin city authorities asked for more than
100,000 copies of the Secret Speech, instead of the 30,000 brochures with
which they had been provided.11
The response to these readings was overwhelming. Although local sec-
retaries tried to convince the party leadership that most communists
understood the speech ‘the right way’, they had to admit that ‘demagogic
anti-party attacks’ were occurring.12 Where discussion was not allowed, the
audience wrote down comments and questions.13 Pankratova returned to
Moscow with 825 notes, which alarmed the Central Committee. People
wondered why the members of the CC pretended not to be involved in the
Stalinist atrocities and why nobody had stopped Stalin.14 Wherever the
Speech was read to party or Komsomol organizations, people claimed
Khrushchev was a coward for not accepting responsibility for the victims
of the terror, or asserted that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were not
enemies of the people, but only of Stalin.15 After such party meetings
people spontaneously took down Stalin portraits, whilst in Stalingrad two
drunken tractor drivers drove into a Stalin monument.16 The Central
66 Susanne Schattenberg
Committee was shocked and decided to publish articles as a guide for the
‘right’ interpretation of the Secret Speech. It invoked the idea of criticism
and self-criticism (samokritika) to claim this extraordinary step was an
ordinary procedure, which the party was ‘courageously’ going through.17
The first Pravda article, revealing and paraphrasing parts of the Secret
Speech, appeared on 28 March. It delivered not only a general attack
against Stalin and Stalinism but also indicated the importance of principles
such as ‘socialist rule of law’, ‘collective leadership’ and ‘inner party demo-
cracy’.18 It was followed by a second contribution on 5 April claiming
imploringly: ‘The Communist Party was victorious and is victorious
because of its devotion to Leninism’.19
When this attempt to guide the ‘correct interpretation’ of the Secret
Speech failed, the party started to threaten those who diverged from it.
The publication of the decree on 30 June ‘About the overcoming of the
personality cult’ was not so much a revelation of further past failures as a
clear warning not to abuse the party’s ‘courageous self-criticism’.20
Those who ‘exaggerated’ criticism after the reading of the Secret Speech
on party meetings were severely purged, dismissed from their institutes or
factories, expelled from the party and even sentenced to several years of
imprisonment.21

Shifting the fight against the personality cult to the factories

But why did the Central Committee carry out this experiment, reading the
Secret Speech to a restricted public and offering a digest in Pravda? Schol-
ars have pointed to the hunger for improved material standards, and have
claimed that disillusionment with the Party grew after the war.22 But in addi-
tion to satisfying material needs, the party had to address another issue that
challenged its power. As long as Stalin lived, the myth of a better life in a
communist future could endure, because he was the incarnation of this
promise. So when he died, the party leadership had to find a new foundation
for the legitimization of its power.23 Khrushchev and the inner circle tried to
fill the void which originated in the loss of the almighty vozhd’ (leader) with
concepts like the ‘rule of law’, ‘party democratization’ and ‘collective leader-
ship’.24 The new information policy was not only a defensive strategy of pub-
licizing issues which would have come to light regardless. It was an offensive
step, propagating an allegedly new political style to the people.25
However, the party leadership came to recognize that criticism could
not be limited to Stalin’s person, nor to the new dogma of ‘rule of law’,
‘collective leadership’ and ‘democracy’. To prevent people from continu-
ing to talk about politics, the party undertook an attempt to restrict the
public and to divert this emerging demand into more profitable, less dan-
gerous channels: criticism should now focus on the economy, which was
promoted by the party as a field where everybody’s participation was
urgently needed.
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 67
The 20th Party Congress was supposed to be identified with the
decision to accelerate economic growth.26 Although we are used to associ-
ating the congress with the Secret Speech, the main subject of the open
meetings was the beginning of the 6th Five Year Plan and the need for
continuous technical progress.27 It was in order to reach these goals that
the party called for ‘much broader participation by the people in the
administration of the state’.28 Thus the promised ‘democratization’ was
primarily to be understood to mean a new style of factory leadership and
new rights for employees to speak out about matters at work.29 Economic
issues served as a substitute to try to distract the people from calling for a
discussion of the whole system.
Thus on 25 May, Pravda published an article entitled ‘Collectivism is
the highest principle of party leadership’, which did not touch on political
matters but instead discussed the new decision-making process in the
economy based on the new decisions of the 20th Party Congress.30 The
author of the article, secretary of the Bashkiriian district party committee,
praised a recently established procedure: before passing a resolution, the
Party would now go to the towns and villages to consult with the people.
Everybody, he claimed, should learn to listen to the voice of the masses.
The result of this new approach was, he said, that more people than ever
had joined the party meetings, wishing to take part in the discussion.31 On
7 August, the secretary of the party bureau in the Kirov Engineering
works in Minsk wrote to Pravda that since the 20th Party Congress a lot
had changed in their daily factory life:32 people, even non-party members,
now came voluntarily to party meetings knowing that it is possible to
discuss production problems openly, whereas formerly they had to endure
endless general speeches and declarations. Even the engineers now
actively participated and stated their opinion. Whilst lower ranking
workers were previously blamed for failures, now even the management
and the deputies of the district party committee were subjected to harsh
criticism for their bureaucratic methods in running the factory.
To show that times were changing, Pravda published a number of cases
like that of Ehrenburg’s novel, telling the stories of engineers and inven-
tors who had suffered under their bureaucratic bosses or apathetic admin-
istrators. For example, engineer Mitichev had suffered after inventing a
new style of cooling metal in the foundry, because his director Iakimchik
was not interested in modernizing technology.33 Instead of changing the
production process to get better results with the consent of the chief of the
Central Committee of the Belorussian party, he forced Mitichev to gloss
over the statistics. When Mitichev nevertheless finally succeeded in imple-
menting his invention, thereby nearly doubling the daily output of the
foundry, the director began boasting about having defended his engineer
against all nay-sayers. He continued praising himself until employees
started writing complaints about him to the administration. After a factory
meeting dedicated to the 20th Party Congress the director was dismissed,
68 Susanne Schattenberg
just like Ehrenburg’s Zhuravlev, for ‘passivity’, ‘conservatism’ and ‘indif-
ference towards factory matters and his employees’.
Pravda now claimed that no one had to fear signing his complaint and
published a letter from four engineers from the Moscow automobile works
recounting their suffering under the factory administration.34 They recoun-
ted that in the traditional Soviet manner directors and department heads
considered inventors to be ‘restless people’ causing only trouble, disturb-
ing regular production. Some of these engineers had invented a new
method of vacuum founding showing very promising results. But because
of the chief engineer’s and the chief metallurgist’s lack of interest, its
further development was cancelled before it had even passed the first
stages of testing. Another engineer, Iurii Nemtsov, had constructed a new
steering wheel, but had to fight for seven years against several institutions,
the ministry, the trade union’s central committee and the Moscow party
committee to have his invention implemented, saving 4.3 million roubles a
year. But even then his suffering did not come to an end. The head of the
factory’s ‘Bureau for support of rationalizations and inventions’ (BRIZ)
and the head of the Department for inventions of the ministry requested
that Nemtsov consent to having co-authors for his invention. When he
refused, they put him on trial. The case was dismissed, but Nemtsov’s mar-
tyrdom continued when his opponents began to spread rumours denying
Nemtsov’s patent.
This letter was followed by several articles about inventors and their
hopeless fight against directors, administrations and ministry departments
in the Soviet Union, describing a time of injustice in factories, now
coming to an end.35 ‘Make way for the inventors’ and rationalizers’ cre-
ative powers’ was one new slogan used against directors, who ‘disguised
shortcomings’, ‘glossed over reality’, who were practised in ‘eyewash’,
‘declarationism’ and ‘paper skills’.36 Using a caricature of ‘The machinery
of delays – the bureaucratic conveyer for ‘treating’ rationalizing pro-
posals’, Pravda attacked the irresponsible way in which factories, min-
istries and authorities dealt with inventions, mangling, stamping, freezing,
cooking and pressing them, only, finally, to throw them on the rubbish
heap.37
Pravda suggested that a new era had begun, in which employees were
invited to participate actively in the decision-making process and engi-
neers were finally able to implement their inventions without any obstacles
and without having to pass through endless institutions, committees and
commissions.38 It is worth noting that the old directors and administrators,
those ‘flatterers’ and ‘obsequious hallelujah-singers’, were characterized as
remnants of the personality cult. Claims that ‘liquidating and getting rid of
these most harmful remains of the personality cult is our urgent task’
diverted attention away from guilty party members and called on readers
to concentrate on bureaucrats in the administrative apparatus.39 Thus the
overcoming of the personality cult was diverted from the level of the party
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 69
to a secondary level, the workplace, where new support for economic
growth was being sought.40 ‘Democratization’ came to mean open discus-
sions in factory party meetings; ‘collective leadership’ now meant that
factory directors would listen to their engineers before passing resolutions.

The inventor as hero for a new Soviet life

The party made the inventor the centre of its new campaign. The engineer
was therefore rediscovered as a protagonist. Since the revolution, the
factory had been the favoured Soviet setting and the traditional centre of
social and political life, where the New Man was born, educated and
formed.41 In the 1930s the worker became the engineer, and the engineer
in turn became the hero and ideal of the Stalin period, and this was now
reintroduced.42 As Petr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis argue, when it became
evident that even the party was not infallible, society longed for a new
cult, and the subject of this cult became the physician or inventor.43 After
it had turned out that words could deceive, it was easier to believe in
scientific formulas. The new ideals of honesty, sincerity, decency and love
of truth were embodied in the scientific researcher.44 Like the 35-year-old
engineer Koroteev in The Thaw, it was the second generation of techni-
cians, raised in the 1930s, mostly too young to be involved in the Great
Terror, who became the incarnation of honesty and integrity. Having
participated in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, and made their careers in the
paralysed and frozen society of the late Stalin period, they now had the
opportunity to free themselves from despotic oppression and regain
the old way of revolutionary work and life – such, at least, was the message
of The Thaw. It is crucial to note that both the party and the intelligentsia
chose the inventor to be the right person for a new beginning. But whilst
the intelligentsia was drawn to the inventor because he was free from the
burden of history and sought the truth, the party made him the centre of
its economic politics solely in order to increase production.
To provide industry with a better supply of new technology and to
ensure the implementation of new inventions, the Council of Ministers
founded a ‘Committee of matters of inventions and discoveries’ (Gosu-
darstvennyi komitet po delam izobretenii i otkrytii, GKIO) on 23 February
1956.45 This committee had the task of centralizing the reception of inven-
tion proposals, accelerating testing and guaranteeing an application’s
success.46 Another way of broadening participation in the production
process was intensifying and expanding the work of the scientific-technical
committees (NTK), which were reformed by the Central Committee
plenum in July 1955.47 NTKs were supposed to be founded in all regions to
base industrial development on the ‘knowledge and experience of a major-
ity of the country’s leading scientists and engineers’, instead of relying on
only ‘a few cadres’, as had been the case before.48 A total of 76 commissions
with 1,608 specialists were established on the level of the Union and
70 Susanne Schattenberg
another 213 commissions with over 2,500 specialists in the Soviet
republics.49 A new law protecting inventors and encouraging inventions was
also enacted in 1956.50 On 1 April, the GKIO opened its doors for letters
and proposals. Starting in July, the new journal Invention in the USSR was
published, and in several towns inventors’ meetings took place.51 The head
of the GKIO A.F. Garmashev aimed to activate the Komsomol, and he
called for the press to become patron of the campaign and for more novels
and feature films supporting inventors.52 The culminating point of this cam-
paign was the All-union meeting of inventors and rationalizers in Moscow
on 17 October 1956. A total of 1,964 people gathered in the Kremlin Palace
to discuss new achievements and to report their experience.53
In this situation in autumn 1956 the journal Novyi mir published
Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinym).54
The novel epitomized the problems which were discussed in Pravda, at
factory party meetings or at the inventors’ assemblies. Dudintsev chose
the figure of the inventor Lopatkin to tell the story of the morally superior
Soviet Man being humiliated by his superiors, mocked, exploited and
destroyed by the gang of bureaucrats which had grown above him. The
novel matched the mood of the year 1956.55 People would talk about how
‘In our factory we had a similar case . . . In our ministry I know several of
those bureaucrats . . .’.56 It is worth noting that the readers’ discussion took
place at the same time that Pravda printed its campaign against those
bureaucrats ‘cooking’ and ‘freezing’ technical proposals. The official
public of Pravda and the semi-official public of the readers’ discussion
unified, giving the impression that Dudintsev and the party were fighting
for the same lost ideal of the good Soviet Man. But how did engineers and
inventors react to this development?

Fighting against the ‘little Stalins’

It would appear that the campaign for mass inventorship and Dudintsev’s
novel responded to engineers’ needs. The NTKs reported ‘that scientists
and engineers were taking part in these commissions with great élan,
explaining that for many years nobody had called them in for active partic-
ipation in deciding important questions about the development and
implementation of new technologies’.57 These engineers were less inter-
ested in high politics than in solving production problems and getting rid
of the ‘little Stalins’ who hindered them from doing their jobs like the
Zhuravlevs in The Thaw or the Drozdovs in Not by Bread Alone. Whilst
some readers considered one of Dudintsev’s characters, Professor Bus’ko,
an inventor who dies alone and in poverty, an exaggeration, engineers
stated that there were dozens of technicians who died alone having never
been acknowledged as inventors.58 Not by Bread Alone seemed to be
telling their own story. But whilst the Central Committee campaign and
Garmashev, head of the GKIO, mentioned the shortcomings of the min-
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 71
istries and administrations in very general terms, focusing more on the
losses to the national economy than on blaming the injustice done to the
inventors,59 the latter felt encouraged to blame specific individuals and call
for their dismissal. This constituted a fundamental misunderstanding
between inventors and the party.
Engineers not only began recounting their suffering, but also started to
demand the dismissal of their superiors. One of the notes to Anna Pankra-
tova after her introduction of the Secret Speech even read:

At the 20th Party Congress a lot has been said about reforming the
production process, which, it seems, is not taking place in Leningrad.
Is it possible to speak about this process, if the majority of our leading
employees, who have worked for many years for their own interest
instead of for the people’s, remain in their posts as ‘experienced
leaders’.60

Others referred to a thick layer of bureaucrats existing in the Soviet

Union who had usurped all power.61 In Kalinin, workers and engineers
used the slogan of the personality cult to oppose the principle of single
leadership (edinonachalie).62 They began calling for the right to elect and
dismiss their directors.63
Finally the establishment of the GKIO on 1 April 1956 caused an over-
whelming reaction. Although the committee had as yet no permanent
address,64 in just the first year it received 25,000 petitions and letters from
inventors, some reporting cases that had lasted ten to twenty years.65
Among these letters were 9,165 complaints ‘about incorrect calculations of
the savings made [by their inventions] and non-payment of rewards, about
[the authorities] losing or stealing proposals, about indifference and being
forced to go through a lot of red tape during the testing and implementing
of their proposals’.66 Most of the complainants called for an extensive
investigation of the ministries and enterprises.67 For them, the enemy was
now the despotic and ignorant apparatchik. It was usual for inventors’ pro-
posals to disappear into an impenetrable jungle for three or more years.
After this period the invention would be rejected as impractical or it
would be claimed that such a machine already existed. The apparatchiks’
co-conspirators were the scientific authorities from the Institutes of Scient-
ific Research (NII), who appropriated the engineers’ inventions and
passed them off as their own or who demanded co-authorship. ‘(. . .) the
NII presented the opportunity to individual researchers, who themselves
were not capable of scientific work, to steal the invention from the inven-
tor under the banner of the NII’.68 The institutes not only refused to
support the inventors’ initiative, but suppressed them using the authority
of their scientific institution.
Two inventors complained to Bulganin, head of the Council of Minis-
ters, about these ‘experts’:
72 Susanne Schattenberg
You have to understand that blockheads and impotents exist not only
in biology, but also in the scientific-technological field. The Institutes
of Scientific Research must get rid of unskilled people regardless of
how many diplomas they have. Diplomas and a great length of service
without any results have to be seen as indisputable proof of non-
suitability for the job.69

The fact that members of the Academy of Sciences owed their posts to
patronage and not to expert knowledge even became the subject of anec-
dotes, such as the following:

The director of an academic institute is called by the porter and told that
somebody without documents, calling himself academician Ovcharenko,
demands admission. The director says: ‘Ask him the formula for water!’
– ‘He doesn’t know’, reports the frightened porter. ‘That’s him, academi-
cian Ovcharenko! Let him in’, answers the director.70

What sounded funny in anecdotes was the bitter reality for many inven-
tors, who complained about the incompetence of those institutions on
which they were dependent. The engineer Iakov Nikolaevich Klepnikov
had fought for several years for his machine, eventually going bankrupt.
His story reads like Dudintsev’s novel. Klepnikov had passed through all
institutions, and had even been to the ministry in Moscow, only to be
received with indifference, lies and mockery.71 His idea of using the heat of
waste gas for the production of steam failed because the chief engineer
Shevchenko, though agreeing that this was a useful invention, denied that
it was applicable to their factory. Klepnikov then turned to the chief engi-
neer of the Main Administration of Industrial Glass (GlavTekhSteklo),
who did not answer for several months. Finally he decided to speed up
matters, took all his savings and travelled to Moscow to GlavTekhSteklo,
where the administration head Germanov told him that there was nothing
new in his invention. Nevertheless Klepnikov did not give up. He wrote to
the Ministry for Building Materials, talked to the deputy minister, to the
deputy head of the technical administration, to the trust head and others,
and finally found out that nobody had ever tested his invention. He spent
two weeks in Moscow squandering all of his money and had to leave with
just a promise from the main administration council that they would finally
test the machine. This was not an isolated case: at trade union meetings
engineers and workers accused the chief engineers of not being interested
in technical innovations or production rationalization.72 Others com-
plained about directors who took premiums for production methods
invented by their staff or about ministries which refused to acknowledge
inventions, pretending they had already been published.73
The ‘fight against the administrative and office-bureaucratic method of
leadership’74 had flared up and was fought by engineers as their own battle
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 73
and with their own means. Although Pravda announced that people had
started to sign their letters, not all put their name to their accusations
against the ‘little Stalins’. A ‘group of party members’ from the factory no.
648 in Krasnoarmeisk complained to Khrushchev about their director Vik-
torov, who had surrounded himself with

Alcoholics, rogues and the like: his assistant Iodarnskii is a drinker

and bribe-taker, the head of the supply department is a notorious
rogue, fired from the former Ministry of Agricultural Mechanical
Engineering for embezzlement, while working in enterprises he
embezzled enough to build himself a cottage near Pushkin. The
deputy head Konovalov actively participated in all kinds of wheeling
and dealing with the former heads Vershinin and Khokhlov, and he is
a well-known producer of rejects. The production head is an uncon-
trolled drinker and layabout, who was expelled from the Ural factories
as an incurable drinker.75

Because of the director’s indifference, a dam wall had broken and caused
3.5 million roubles in damage. The complainants suggested that Viktorov
had never studied at a university. Although the dam accident had been
investigated by three commissions, nobody held Viktorov accountable.
The ‘group’ reported: ‘People keep saying there is no truth anymore. It
was hidden by rogues, greedy persons, scoundrels and those who gloss
things over like Viktorov. The people are outraged, because nobody fights
against these rogues and no measures are taken against them’.76 State-
ments like this expressed very clearly that engineers considered
bureaucrats their worst enemies. They saw society as divided into the
masses on the one side and a small but mighty clique of administrators on
the other.
A group of employees from the Ministry of the Armaments Industry,
who were also ‘afraid to give their signature’, were equally clear in
expressing their discontent with their despotic bosses.77 They reminded
Malenkov of the new policies which were supposed to support people in
taking initiative and showing their talents. That made them wonder why in
the Ministry of the Armaments Industry only second level officials had
been expelled while the management continued to rule the old way:

The Minister comrade D.F. Ustinov obviously considers despotism to

be the best method of leadership. In that he is unquestionably a suc-
cessor to Arakcheev.78 [. . .] The collective meeting room functions as a
place of execution as under Ivan the Terrible. Cooperation is out of
the question, because all members of the staff are frightened and used
to voting for decisions made by ‘HIMSELF’. Everybody who falls out
of Ustinov’s favour, even the most talented employee, will be
destroyed by him.
74 Susanne Schattenberg
This atmosphere of fear resulted in the fact that decisions which would have
been in the interests of the factory were not made, and a ‘group of syco-
phants, slanderers and scandalmongers’ formed around Ustinov. The min-
istry did not resemble a rational administration, but a despot’s court: instead
of working on fulfilling the plan, people were ‘taken to the gallows’.79
Inventors used the vocabulary given to them by the party and the
writers to blame their directors, as they had blamed their colleagues in
the 1930s as ‘Trotskyites’ or ‘enemies of the people’. Nevertheless state-
ments accusing somebody of being a successor to Arakcheev show that
these were not just formulas, but were also drawn directly from the engi-
neers’ own painful experience. The picture created by inventors to
describe their everyday life went beyond the party’s slogans about tech-
nical progress, democratic decisions and the people’s welfare. What was
reported was not the failure of a few individuals, but of a whole system
functioning on the basis of patronage, clientelism and networks of officials
protecting one another. These were two parallel worlds: engineers who
saw the urgent need for their inventions on the shop floor, and officials
who thought in administrative terms of plan fulfilment and ministry
requirements. Obviously they belonged to two different systems function-
ing on contrasting rules. There was a dividing line between the nomen-
klatura and ordinary employees which ran through the factories, dividing
them into two cultures. On one side were those who owed their posts to
higher officials, forming a community of mutual loyalty. On the other were
those who had to cope with the adverse production conditions on the
shop floor every day, fighting not with the help, but rather against the
resistance of their directors for technical improvement. The results of
the party’s experiment in ‘factory democracy’ were disastrous. The
engineers demanded a change of management for which the party was not
prepared.

Conclusion
In disseminating the Secret Speech and calling for collective leadership
and the people’s initiative the party tried to kill two birds with one stone.
‘Democratization’ and the alleged fight against bureaucratism were
intended to ensure a new legitimate foundation for the state on the one
hand, and economic growth and technological development on the other
hand. But as the consequences of publishing the speech and its general dis-
cussion seemed too dangerous and unpredictable, the Central Committee
chose party meetings in the factories and institutes as a test ground for this
kind of partial public. When even this restricted space threatened to run
out of control, the subject under discussion, under the heading of
‘democratization’, was further narrowed to matters of productivity and
plan fulfilment. The party leaders could not foresee that their campaign
would be reinforced by Dudintsev’s novel.
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 75
Albeit for different reasons, both the party and the intelligentsia
decided that the inventor should be the new hero of the period. This
double shift, from an entire to a partial public, and from politics to the
economy, was accepted by people who interpreted the Secret Speech as
indicating that the ‘little Stalins’ were their despotic directors, and that
inventors were in need of liberation. This form of translating the Secret
Speech into everyday life constituted a fundamental misunderstanding
between the party, which wanted people to focus on economic matters,
and those who saw the problems of the factory as a parable for the entire
Soviet system. When people focused not on productivity increases, but
rather on appeals for bureaucrats to be sacked, it became clear that even
this experiment in ‘democratization’ had failed. That is the reason why, on
2 December 1956, Dudintsev’s novel was harshly criticized as ‘harmful’
and ‘libellous’ by the party, still reeling from events in Poland and
Hungary.80
Although Khrushchev idealized the masses’ participation in the con-
struction process, the party was not willing to replace large number of dir-
ectors.81 ‘In fighting against the personality cult, we are not denying
authorities and their great significance’, wrote Pravda.82 ‘Collective leader-
ship’ meant exploiting the full potential of all engineers, but not any fun-
damental revision of the form and structure of leadership. One year after
the GKIO’s foundation, it was characterized as a ‘bureaucratic and help-
less registration office’, whose staff was dominated by ‘bureaucratic ele-
ments’, with not a single inventor.83 Although these measures to increase
participation were failing, in 1957 Khrushchev founded local economic
councils (sovnarkhozy), which were supposed to shift powers from the
ministries to the regions,84 the NTK movement, seeking to include the
engineers from the shop floors into planning persisted,85 and in 1958
‘Permanent production conferences’ were introduced to ensure the
workers’ and engineers’ initiative in the decision-making process.86
All these measures could not change two fundamental problems. The
first consisted in the structure of economic planning which opposed any
invention. The introduction of any new product or production method
meant risk, rejections, and plan backlog.87 So it is no wonder that the
administration avoided inventions like the plague.88 The second problem
was connected with the first. Instead of technological experts, what was
needed were people who could guarantee the status quo. That is what the
cases of engineer Klepnikov, the ‘group of party members’ and the
employees of the Ministry of the Armament Industry demonstrate, and
this is what incensed people. The higher authorities and ministries seemed
to form a community of interests against which they were powerless. The
journalist and party theoretician Arbatov called this the ‘reinforced con-
crete of the administrative-command style’.89 The bureaucracy formed a
closed system of members who protected each other from attacks from
outside.
76 Susanne Schattenberg
So in the end the Secret Speech caused only new frustrations, because
even on the non-political level of everyday work it could not provide the
new revolutionary beginning that it had claimed to bring. Engineers had
felt encouraged to press for changes, only to recognize that they were
powerless against the administration. Although few engineers indicate that
they experienced the Khrushchev period as a romantic-revolutionary
time,91 sooner or later even they came to realize that in the Soviet Union
there existed two groups, whose worlds and interests intersected only at a
few minor points: the nomenklatura on the one hand and the ordinary
people on the other. So the Secret Speech merely proved that communica-
tion between functionaries and working men was not functioning any
more, because both spoke different languages, leading to misunderstand-
ing or indeed a total lack of mutual understanding.

Notes

1 This article is in part the result of my work at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische
Forschung in Potsdam in 2001/2002 – many thanks to those who supported me
there. Many thanks to Rachel Lindsay, who corrected my English.
2 I. Ehrenburg, Tauwetter, Berlin, 1957, p. 151.
3 Ibid., pp. 184, 191.
4 About the history of the Secret Speech see R. Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, Istoriia
vlasti 1945–1991, Moscow: RAGS, 1998; R. Medvedev, ‘Vom 20. zum 22.
Parteitag der KPdSU: Ein kurzer historischer Überblick’, in R Medwedew, R.
Havemann (eds), Entstalinisierung. Der 20. Parteitag der KPdSU und seine
Folgen, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, pp. 23–49; S. Merl, ‘Berija und Chrushchev:
Entstalinisierung oder Systemerhalt? Zum Grunddilemma sowjetischer Politik
nach Stalins Tod’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, vol. 52, no. 9,
2001, 484–506; V. Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede N.S. Chrushchevs
auf dem 20. Parteitag der KPdSU’, Forum für Osteuropäischen Ideen- und Zeit-
geschichte, vol. 1, no. 1, 1997, 137–77.
5 B. Weil, ‘Legalität und Untergrund zur Zeit des Tauwetters’, in D. Beyrau
(ed.), Das Tauwetter und die Folgen: Kultur und Politik in Osteuropa nach
1956, Bremen, 1988, pp. 23–41, here p. 26.
6 M. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: Ot 1953 ogo k 1956-omu godu’, Otechestven-
naia istoriia, 1995, vol. 2, 125; Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, p. 146.
7 About the concept of different partial publics in totalitarian states see A. von
Saldern, ‘Öffentlichkeiten in Diktaturen. Zu den Herrschaftspraktiken im
Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in G. Heydemann and H. Oberreuter (eds),
Diktaturen in Deutschland – Vergleichsaspekte, Bonn, 2003, pp. 442–75.
8 RGANI, 1/5/747/75; c.f. L. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke. Sovetskaia
istoriografiia pervogo poslestalinskogo desiatiletiia, Moscow: Pamiatniki
istoricheskoi nauki, 1997, p. 80.
9 R. Orlova, L. Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, 1956–1980, Moscow, 1990, p. 23.
10 RGANI, 5/34/2/10, 13, 14.
11 RGANI, 5/34/2/21.
12 RGANI, 5/34/2/11.
13 See Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede’, p. 173.
14 RGANI, 1/5/747/76-82.
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 77
15 N. Barsukov, ‘Oborotnaia storona ottepeli (istoriko-dokumental’nyi ocherk)’,
Kentavr, vol. 4, 1993, 129–43, here, 136–7.
16 RGANI, 5/34/2/22.
17 About criticism and self-criticism see L. Erren, ‘Kritik und Selbstkritik’ in der
sowjetischen Parteiöffentlichkeit der dreißiger Jahre. Ein mißverstandenes
Schlagwort und seine Wirkung’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 50,
no. 2, 2002, 186–94.
18 ‘Pochemu kul’t lichnosti chuzhd dukhu marksizma-leninizma?’, Pravda, 28
March 1956.
19 ‘Kommunisticheskaia partiia pobezhdala i pobezhdaet vernostiu Leninizmu’,
Pravda, 5 April 1956.
20 ‘Postanovlenie CK KPSS: O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii’,
Pravda, 2 July 1956.
21 Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede’, p. 175; Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, p.
149; A. Pyzhikov, ‘20 s’’ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, Svobodnaia mysl’, vol.
21, no. 8, 2000, 76–85, here 82.
22 See E. Zubkova, Russia after the War. Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments,
1945–1957, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998; S. Reid, D. Crowley (eds), Style and
Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post War Eastern Europe,
Oxford: Berg, 2000; A. Pyzhikov, ‘Sovetskoe poslevoennoe obshchestvo i pred-
posylki khrushchevskikh reform’ Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 2002, 33–43.
23 H. Altrichter, Kleine Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917–1991, München, 2001,
p. 141; Merl, Berija und Chrushchev, p. 491.
24 See for example, ‘Sovetskaia sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ neprikosnovenna’,
Pravda, 6 April 1953; ‘Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ na strazhe naroda’,
Pravda, 17 April 1953.
25 About the new features of criticism, see G. Breslauer, ‘On criticism: The
significance of the 20th Party Congress’, in F. Gori (ed.), Il 20 congresso del
Pcus, Milan, 1988, pp. 115–30.
26 See KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s’’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK,
1956–1960, vol. 9, Moscow, 1986, pp. 17, 29.
27 See also M. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, M. McCauley (ed.),
Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 71–94, here
p. 72.
28 Ibid., pp. 22–3.
29 C.f. D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The consolidation of the
modern system of Soviet production relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992, p. 42.
30 ‘Kollektivnost’ – vysshii printsip partiinogo rukovodstva’, Pravda, 25 May 1956.
31 Ibid.
32 ‘Rastet aktivnost’ kommunistov’, Pravda, 7 August 1956.
33 ‘Delo inzhenera Miticheva’, Pravda, 11 June 1956.
34 ‘Chto prepiatstvuet tvorchestvu izobretatelei? Pis’mo v redaktsiiu’, Pravda, 2
September 1956.
35 See Pravda, 28 March 1956 and Ibid., 4 August 1956.
36 ‘Tvorchestvu izobretatelei i ratsionalizatorov – shirokuiu dorogu!’, Pravda, 6
October 1956.
37 ‘Volokitnyi stan’’, Pravda, 17 October 1956.
38 ‘Neustannoi rabotoi’ sovershenstvovat’ metody partiinoi raboty’, Pravda, 4
August 1956; ‘Bol’she vnimaniia rabochemu izobretatel’stvu’, Ibid., 4 October
1956; ‘Nel’zia teriat’ tsennye mysli’, Ibid., 17 October 1956.
39 ‘Pochemu kul’t lichnosti chuzhd dukhu marksizma-leninizma?’.
40 C.f. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 73.
78 Susanne Schattenberg
41 S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995; A. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power. The History
of Dneprostroi, New York, Oxford, 1988.
42 See S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union,
1921–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; idem, ‘Stalin and the
Making of a New Elite, 1928–1939’, Slavic Review, vol. 38, 1979, 377–402; D.
Beyrau, Intelligenz und Dissenz. Die russischen Bildungsschichten in der Sowje-
tunion 1917–1985, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993; S. Schatten-
berg, Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den
1930er Jahren, Munich: L. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2002.
43 P. Vail’ and A. Genis, 60e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Moscow: Novoe liter-
aturnoe obozrenie, 1996, p. 100.
44 Ibid.
45 RGAE, 373/1/6/8.
46 Ibid., l.21.
47 See also Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 80.
48 GARF, R-5446/124/1/42.
49 Ibid., ll.35–6.
50 RGAE, 373/1/11-13.
51 RGAE, 373/1/6/4, 6.
52 RGANI, 5/40/35/46, 48.
53 RGAE, 373/1/6/2; RGANI, 5/40/31/14-15.
54 V. Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, nos. 8–10, 1956.
55 See Orlova, Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, p. 37; D. Rachkov, Minuet
pechal’nogo vremeni. Zapiski shestidesiatnika, Moscow: knizhnaia palata (izd.
na sredstvo avtora), 1991, p. 6.
56 Orlova, Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, p. 37.
57 GARF, R-5446/124/1/34.
58 Rachkov, Minuet pechal’nogo vremeni, p. 13.
59 RGANI, 5/40/31/14, 35, 41; RGAE, 373/1/6/7.
60 RGANI, 5/16/747/82.
61 Barsukov, ‘Oborotnaia storona ottepeli’, 136–7.
62 RGANI, 5/34/2/21.
63 Pyzhikov, ‘20 s’’ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, p. 84.
64 RGAE, 373/1/6/30, 39.
65 RGANI, 5/40/35/5. Unfortunately, it seems that these petitions and letters were
not saved in the archives. They are not in collection no. 373 with the files of the
committee in the RGAE. According to the employees of the archive either
these ‘unofficial documents’ were never archived or they were destroyed after a
storage period of 25 years.
66 RGANI, 5/40/35/32.
67 Ibid., l.33.
68 RGAE, 373/1/11/16.
69 RGAE, 373/1/6/63-64.
70 V. Korotich, Ot pervogo litsa. Vospominaniia, Moscow: Folio, 2000, p. 92.
71 GARF, R-5446/124/1/294-296.
72 See for example GARF, R-5451/25/5474/13.
73 GARF, R-5451/24/1542/127, 290.
74 KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, p. 23.
75 GARF, R-5446/123/2/113-116.
76 Ibid., l.115.
77 GARF, R-5446/123/1/18
78 Aleksei Andreevich Arakcheev (1769–1834), minister of war under Aleksandr
 ‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 79
I. (1808–10), since 1817 head of the military settlements, known for his cruelty
and violence.
79 Ibid.
80 Pravda, 2 December 1956; Novyi mir, 1957, no. 10, p. 7; RGANI, 5/40/35/9, 49.
81 See H. Schröder, ‘“Lebendige Verbindungen mit den Massen”. Sowjetische
Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chrushchev’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeit-
geschichte, vol. 34, no. 4, 1986, pp. 523–60; O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and
the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices, Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1999.
82 ‘Leninizm – pobedonosnoe znamia sovremennoi epokhi. Doklad tov. D.T.
Shepilova’, Pravda, 23 April 1956.
83 RGAE, 373/1/6/60.
84 See D. Filtzer, Die Chruschtschow-Ära. Entstalinisierung und die Grenzen der
Reform in der USSR, 1954–1964, Mainz: Decaton Verlag, 1995, p. 79; Berry,
‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 78; ‘N. Khrushchev: Za tesnuiu sviaz’
literatury i iskusstva s zhizn’iu naroda’, Novyi mir, 1957, no. 7, 4.
85 GARF, R-5446/124/1/35, 32.
86 See Altrichter, Kleine Geschichte der Sowjetunion, p. 140.
87 C.f. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 76.
88 A. Fedoseev, Zapadnia. Chelovek i socializm, Frankfurt on Main: Possev
Verlag, 1979; Id., Sbornik statei. Iz serii: ‘Socializm i diktatura. Prichina i sled-
stvie’, Frankfurt on Main: Posev, 1971.
89 G.A. Arbatov, Zatianuvsheesia vyzdorovlenie (1953–1985). Svidetel’stvo sovre-
menniks, Moscow: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1991, p. 70.
90 For example, in the RGAE among the great quantity of personal collections of
engineers and managers there is no personal document telling about the period
after Stalin’s death. See RGAE. Putevoditel, vol. 3: Fondy lichnogo
proiskhozhdeniia, Moscow 2001. The well-known engineer Andrej Botchkin
gives a report about his work in the 1950s, but says nothing about political
changes. A. Botchkin, Mein ganzes Leben, Moscow: APN-Verlag Novosti,
1976; RGAE, 475/1/14.
91 L. Polezhaev, Put’ k sebe. Vospominaniia, Alma-Ata: Vagrius, 1993, pp. 56–7.
4 Naming the social evil
The readers of Novyi mir and
Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread
Alone, 1956–59 and beyond
Denis Kozlov

In 1956 Novyi mir, under the editorship of Konstantin Simonov, published

the novel Not by Bread Alone by Vladimir Dmitrievich Dudintsev
(1918–98).1 Except for historians and literary scholars, most young Rus-
sians would probably shrug their shoulders today when asked about this
novel. Yet those who remember the years 1956–57 are likely to respond to
your mention of the book with appreciation, and for good reason.
When, in September 1956, L.G. Usychenko came back to Moscow from
Germany where he had worked for five years, he noticed something new
going on in the city. ‘Everywhere – in the subway, in the streetcars, in the
trolley-buses, – young people, adults, and seniors’ were reading light-blue-
covered issues of Novyi mir containing Dudintsev’s novel.2 The same hap-
pened in Gomel’, Kishinev, Leningrad, Krasnoiarsk, Tashkent, Odessa,
Riga and many other places. Retail kiosks selling the journal sold out
within a few hours. Readers lined up in libraries for months waiting to get
the novel,3 and it was not uncommon for checked-out issues of Novyi mir,
tattered and full of marginalia, to go missing.4 The lucky subscribers were
besieged by scores of friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances who
borrowed the journal for a day and sometimes only for one sleepless
night.5 Readers without such personal ties would turn to the market,
buying Novyi mir at three times the state price.6 People read the novel
silently and aloud, on their own and in groups. Heated discussions of Not
by Bread Alone broke out at homes, workplaces and at numerous readers’
and writers’ conferences.7 Gatherings of readers were sometimes patrolled
by mounted police, as was the case at the Moscow Central House of
Writers on 22 October 1956, where Dudintsev himself was present,
together with many other writers and literary critics. It was there, in the
second-floor Oak Hall, jam-packed with hundreds of people, some of them
apparently hanging outside the building on step-ladders and drain-pipes,
that Konstantin Paustovskii delivered his famous diatribe against the
corrupt, ignorant and parasitic state bureaucrats – the main target of Not
by Bread Alone.8
Like most late Soviet literary discussions, Paustovskii’s speech went far
beyond literature, sending out an indisputably political message. The
 Naming the social evil 81
massive debate around Dudintsev’s novel quickly developed into a collect-
ive examination of the economic problems, political changes, administra-
tive defects, legacies of the past, cultural shifts and ethical dilemmas that
the country and its people confronted at the time. Not by Bread Alone
became a banner of the Thaw.
This essay focuses on readers’ reactions to Dudintsev’s novel, particu-
larly on how the readers explained and sought to resolve the major issues
raised in the book – technological stagnation, bureaucratic sluggishness,
corruption and inefficiency. The chapter contends that the debate
surrounding Not by Bread Alone gave readers an opportunity to complain
about a range of social injustices far beyond the themes of Dudintsev’s
book and manifested new opportunities and enthusiasm for political self-
expression and the exchange of ideas inspired by the 20th Party Congress.
At the same time, the audience’s reasoning of the mid to late 1950s was
heavily influenced by the political culture that had taken shape during the
previous decades, particularly under Stalin. Many remained willing to lay
blame for their own and the country’s troubles on scapegoats, proposing
mechanistic and exclusionary recipes for social improvement. The readers’
attack against the so-called bureaucrats was often phrased in familiar
witch-hunting terms, where ‘bureaucrats’ were reminiscent of erstwhile
wreckers. As equivalents of fictional enemies were not easily identifiable
in reality, the readers frequently named them after Dudintsev’s characters,
which became common nouns in the Soviet language of the early Thaw.
During the 1960s, however, the logic of scapegoating increasingly lost cur-
rency with many readers, as the debate about the Terror compromised the
rhetorical, let alone physical, search for internal ‘enemies’, and a broad
range of other socio-political discussions revealed the depth of the
country’s problems, demanding more sophisticated explanations and
solutions.9
Written (according to Dudintsev) in the late 1940s to early 1950s and
finished in 1956, Not by Bread Alone tells the story of a 30-year-old school-
teacher of physics, Dmitrii Lopatkin, who invents a machine for the cen-
trifugal casting of pipes, thus rationalizing and streamlining this costly and
labour-consuming industrial operation. The novel, whose action takes
place in the late Stalin years, is the saga of Lopatkin’s attempts to put his
invention into practice. Several years of persistent labour, punctuated by
numerous rejections of the machine by corrupt and self-seeking bureau-
crats at research institutes, design bureaus and the ministry in Moscow,
lead Lopatkin into poverty and starvation. Nonetheless, he doggedly per-
sists in his battle against the system, aided by the selfless help of a few
close friends and a loving woman, Nadia, who ultimately leaves her
husband and Lopatkin’s main antagonist, the top industrial administrator
Drozdov. The adamant inventor even goes to prison after his rivals’
intrigues curtail his intermediary success in developing the machine. Even-
tually, justice triumphs. After helpful interventions by friends, the court
82 Denis Kozlov
reviews Lopatkin’s case, and he is released from imprisonment. His long-
time sympathizer, the thoughtful and influential Doctor Galitskii, steps in
for him and assembles his machine at a Urals metallurgical plant, proving
its efficiency to the authorities. The perpetrators of evil, however, escape
largely unhurt and remain cynical about their defeat. The novel ends with
Lopatkin facing his rival bureaucrats at a reception, where he, now
empowered, flings a merciless declaration of war in their faces.10
Contemporary observers and subsequent scholars noted that Not by
Bread Alone retained many features of a Socialist Realist production
novel, and Lopatkin much resembled a traditional positive hero.11 Yet
critics also pointed out that the book was unusual in Soviet literature. The
party was barely mentioned. Lopatkin’s victory was almost accidental, and
his rivals got away unharmed. Unprecedentedly, Dudintsev created a
powerful image of the Soviet industrial management as a corrupt yet
omnipotent bureaucratic machine resisting improvement and innovation,
in which ‘positive’ administrators were exceptional, and against which the
chances of a lonely inventor were practically nil.13
Novyi mir published Dudintsev’s novel at the peak of a massive press
campaign for ‘technical creative work of the masses’, which encouraged a
grass-roots movement of inventors, innovators and ‘rationalizers’ preced-
ing a reduction of the ministries’ power and a shift from the branch to the
territorial principle of economic administration (sovnarkhozy).13 Thus, at
least two main themes of Not by Bread Alone – the promotion of inventors
and the attack on ministerial bureaucracy – sounded very contemporary in
1956, perhaps explaining why the novel saw light. With the nearly simulta-
neous publication of Dudintsev’s work and several other pieces on tech-
nical innovators, Simonov’s Novyi mir became a major centre of
discussion about the country’s economic stagnation.14 Not surprisingly,
when the All-Union conference of rationalizers, inventors and innovators
of production was convened in Moscow on 17–19 October 1956, it was at
Novyi mir’s editorial office that inventors met with writers, Dudintsev
among them.15 A lawyer by training and a professional journalist who
claimed to have spoken to 600 people about problems of technological
innovation, Dudintsev was the right man to stand at the centre of this
campaign.16
Readers’ responses to the book reached phenomenal proportions. At a
time when the audience’s intense reaction to a literary work rarely lasted
longer than two or three months, Novyi mir received hundreds of letters
about Not by Bread Alone for over a year, in late 1956 and throughout
1957. In diminishing numbers, letters kept coming as late as 1958, 1959 and
the early to mid 1960s.17 Even for the literature-centric Soviet civilization
and for a journal as important as Novyi mir, this was an outstanding reson-
ance, and few contemporary writings could boast anything comparable. To
date I have located 720 letters from over 820 readers about Not by Bread
Alone; of these, 698 letters from over 795 people responded specifically to
 Naming the social evil 83
the novel, whilst the rest mentioned it in other contexts.18 In Novyi mir’s
archive, this is the single largest evidence of readers’ response to anything
that the journal published during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In
numbers, if not in significance of readers’ responses, Not by Bread Alone
may even have surpassed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich, for which the journal’s archive thus far reveals 532 letters
from over 579 readers dated 1962–69.19
Most letter writers ecstatically welcomed Not by Bread Alone. Only 27
responses were unmistakably negative, whilst 51 more were unspecific or
neutral, either asking questions or requesting Dudintsev’s address; 17
others were mixed, four of them more or less rejecting, and 13 accepting
the book. The remaining 625 letters praised the novel, unconditionally or
sometimes with reservations. Massive support came from the military,
from engineers, teachers, college students, professors and researchers, as
well as workers.20 Enthusiastic responses came even from such unexpected
places as a local KGB branch in Latvia.21 Pitched rhetorical battles broke
out at the editorial board meetings of Literaturnaia gazeta and Izvestiia
that discussed articles condemning Dudintsev, and many journalists stood
up for the book.22
Describing readers’ responses as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ might seem a
crude replication of the world of Socialist Realist literary characters.23 Yet
these categories may be useful in discussing readers’ reaction to Dudint-
sev. Just as the novel itself pitted upright champions of social benefit
against corrupt self-seeking bureaucrats, so was much of the audience’s
response to Not by Bread Alone formulated as either acceptance or rejec-
tion of Dudintsev’s socio-ethical blueprint. Even though some readers
observed that his characters transcended the divide between ‘positive’ and
‘negative’, many more understood the central tension in the novel as a
battle between the forces of social good and social evil.
On 13 September 1956, the 45-year-old teacher B. Zherdina from
Gomel’, Belorussia, wrote to Dudintsev, after reading only the first part of
his novel:

For the first time in the forty-five years of my life I am writing a letter
to an author [. . .]. At last, literature has begun talking about our
painful problems, about something that hurts and has become, unfor-
tunately, a typical phenomenon of our life! At last, a writer has
appeared who saw predatory beasts enter our life, rally together,
and stand like a wall in the way of everything honest, advanced, and
beautiful!
How numerously they have multiplied lately, these base people
with capitalist mentality, for whom the highest value in the world is
their own status, their carpets, and their peace of mind, and it is for
the sake of the stability of their ideals that they suffocate everything
that might unmask them, anything honest, noble, and advanced.24
84 Denis Kozlov
Zherdina was only afraid that Dudintsev’s powerful opponents would
release ‘the tigers’ upon him. ‘In your literary world, you know, there are
no fewer [. . .] tigers, jackals, and chameleons than in any other one’, she
concluded.25 The night before she wanted to mail her letter, someone
brought her the second part of Not by Bread Alone. Zherdina immediately
‘gnawed into the novel avidly and fearfully’. When going through such
politically daring episodes as Lopatkin’s conversation with the prosecutor,
she had to stop reading because of her excitement. She spent the night
reading and came back to her letter at dawn, writing in haste and apologiz-
ing for the many blots:

I had never thought that it would be so joyful, enough to make me

tremble with excitement, to read in the book those same ideas that
had besieged me so painfully. ‘Their goal is to hold their offices and to
keep enriching themselves!’ How glad I am that Lopatkin’s thoughts
match mine! I think Radishchev’s contemporaries had a similar feeling
when they read his Journey.
I could not fall asleep, so excited I was. With your novel, you have
simply made me (and thousands of others) happy. The horizon
becomes clearer, and the fresh breeze of a nascent morning blows
when one reads your novel.26

Morning came, but the nightmares of darkness had not yet released
their grip on Zherdina. The world around her swarmed with predatory
beasts – tigers, jackals and chameleons – the malevolent bureaucrats who,
just as in Dudintsev’s novel, blocked her and others’ path to happiness.
‘Bureaucrats’ had long been traditional targets of Soviet literature and
the press.27 Yet perhaps never before Not by Bread Alone had they been
represented not as individual exceptions to the rule, but as a vast and
internally coherent subversive class. Whether or not Dudintsev intended
to send that message, many readers perceived his book as a battle cry
against a large caste of hidden enemies. Lopatkin’s declaration of war on
bureaucrats reached a sympathetic audience.
The problem was that before combating villains in actual life one had to
identify them. To equate the ‘bad’ bureaucrats with the whole Soviet
administrative cadre clearly went too far, challenging the entire system’s
legitimacy, which most readers hardly desired. Besides, Not by Bread
Alone showed some ‘good’ administrators, notably Lopatkin’s patron and
benefactor, the intelligent Galitskii who saved the dream machine from
destruction. And so, the nagging question for many enthusiasts of the
book became how to define the forces of social evil, so vividly portrayed in
Dudintsev’s novel but so elusive when it came to finding their real-life
equivalents.
The names came in handy. In letter after letter, readers identified the
bearers of evil in contemporary society by the last names of Dudintsev’s
 Naming the social evil 85
characters. These were Drozdov and his companions – the retrograde pro-
fessor Avdiev, the corrupt deputy minister Shutikov, the self-seeking
experts Fundator and Tepikin, the cynical ministry gofer Nevraev, and the
plagiarizing designers Uriupin and Maksiutenko. These names would
surface in readers’ letters again and again, describing real-life targets of
the book as well as labelling the critics who attacked the novel. A doctor
from Leningrad, L. Grineva, wrote:

Your book does not assault our state system, as your critics try to
argue. On the contrary, your book calls for a defence of our system,
our laws, and our way of life, from the bark beetles that gnaw away at
the main foundations of our life [. . .]. The Drozdovs and Shutikovs,
Avdievs and Fundators, Uriupins and Maksiutenkos play this system
at will, to profit them at a given moment. [. . .]
Your book has done its job: it has awakened, with renewed vigour,
burning hatred against the Drozdovs, the Shutikovs, and other scum
of all breeds and ranks; and as we know, anger helps to gain victory.28

Anger and hatred were common feelings amongst Dudintsev’s readers.

The disastrously malfunctioning economy managed by relatively well-
positioned but often inefficient administrators who, to make things worse,
often displayed haughtiness and disregard toward the rank-and-file, pro-
duced understandable exasperation. In a gesture reminiscent of responses
to the terror of 1937, many readers of the mid to late 1950s readily
exploited the press campaign against the bureaucracy as an opportunity to
pour out their numerous grievances, blaming the bureaucrats for a wide
range of society’s misfortunes far beyond the themes of Not by Bread
Alone.29
The readers watched the press, but its language did not necessarily
dictate the language of readers’ responses. The relationship between the
two was also based on experience and memory. Like newspaper reporters,
most readers declared basic acceptance of the existing order, seeking to
present social problems as technical rather than systemic, and personifying
responsibility for tensions and economic failures. Yet the language of
terror was no longer widespread or pronounced in the press of 1956: news-
papers and journals rarely called for criminal prosecution of faulty admin-
istrators, as a rule reproaching them or at worst suggesting removal from
office. The press could also send contradictory signals to the readers,
within the space of a few months attacking a minister and then reporting
that he had been awarded an Order of Lenin.30 And obviously, the
country’s leadership had no plans for a terror campaign against economic
administrators. But what is obvious today was less than obvious to the
readers of 1956. Given that, in the recent past, criticism in the press had
often portended physical repression, few could confidently predict that the
crusade against bureaucrats would not result in another purge. It was
86 Denis Kozlov
natural for the letter writers to keep reasoning in the same exclusionary
terms to which they had been accustomed. In the mid to late 1950s, the
language and logic of terror came not so much from the press as from the
readers themselves.
When labelling social evils by the names of Dudintsev’s characters,
readers of the early Thaw not only followed a Russian socio-literary tradi-
tion that had produced such common nouns as Mitrofan from Fonvizin’s
The Minor, Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Inspector General, Oblomov
from Goncharov’s novel, and so on, but also trod a familiar path of witch-
hunting and scapegoating, dating back to the Civil War and endorsed by
the regime’s founding ideologues. S.S. Kovalev, a senior engineer-designer
at the Glukhovo cotton factory near Noginsk, Moscow region, justified the
struggle against bureaucrats in the following terms:

[R]emember Gorkii’s [. . .] hatred of petty bourgeoisie – and he knew

well whom to hate. Then remember Lenin’s thesis that we will defeat
capitalism only because we can – and we will! – create a higher pro-
ductivity of labour. And high productivity of labour means, first of all,
the creative work of inventors and innovators freed from rascals and
bureaucrats; it means science over which no rotten or cunning authori-
ties preside. Consequently, anyone who, willingly or not, impedes
technical progress, helps our enemies! This is the logic.31

Kovalev’s hatred of the bureaucracy was understandable: he was an

inventor, one of many Lopatkin-type innovators who praised the book,
having had their share of trouble with inefficient, corrupt and haughty
administrators.32 Yet such reasoning was not limited to exasperated engi-
neers and inventors. Viktor Matveev read the novel and attended three
readers’ conferences – at a district library in Moscow, among inventors,
and at the Moscow State University. Excited by Dudintsev’s triumph at
the conferences, Matveev produced a long eulogy of the book combined
with a furious tirade against ‘the Drozdovs’:

It is true that, even before this book came into being, we knew the
words ‘bureaucrat’, ‘careerist’, and ‘self-seeker’. But V. Dudintsev
[. . .] stopped the inter-mixing of pure and impure that was so prof-
itable for the Drozdovs. [. . .] In other words, he pulled out and
showed everyone the slime that had for decades hidden behind the
broad backs of honest Soviet people. And it is well known that a dis-
covered enemy is another step toward victory (otkrytyi vrag – k
pobede shag)! [. . .]
Like worms gnawing away at a tree, they do not think about the
tree at all. [. . .] Our tragedy, and their strength, is that they are dis-
persed everywhere but at the same time coherent, bound together
by mutual obligations and criminal patronage. They are
 Naming the social evil 87
omnipresent. They are few in numbers – but they are everywhere;
they are in the pores of our life; and this is why they are exception-
ally dangerous.
The Drozdovs are double-faced people. Their legal activities are
but a mask. Their illegal, criminal activities are their essence. [. . .]
People, be vigilant!33

It was as though Matveev had co-authored his letter with the teacher
Zherdina, the doctor Grineva and the engineer Kovalev. The metaphors
that they used to describe the vicious Drozdovs were very similar – only,
Grineva’s ‘bark beetles’ were replaced with Matveev’s ‘worms gnawing
away at a tree’. Not only was the language identical, but it was also dis-
turbingly redolent of the newspaper campaigns against ‘enemies of the
people’ in the 1920s and especially 1930s. Metaphors of social hygiene
likened the hidden adversaries to insects, rodents, reptiles and beasts of
prey,34 charging them with greed for self-enrichment – an ‘animal’ trait
that many Russians believed, at least as far back as the turn of the 20th
century, befitted the petty bourgeois but not a human being in a model
(socialist) society.35 And as vigorously as before, many letter writers
insisted on demarcating the lines between Good and Evil – a problem that
had long been pronounced in Russian culture, but assumed rationalistic
overtones in the twentieth century, as a practical attempt at separating
good from evil was undertaken during the Great Terror.36 The images of
clandestine internal foes masked as friends,37 the likening of imaginary
enemies to predators and vermin, the calls for vigilance, and the socio-
ethical stratagems that many of Dudintsev’s admirers reproduced in the
mid-to-late 1950s, were identical to the formulas that had once heralded
the terror.
The rhetoric of social conflict explicitly turned against the entire class of
state administrators sent an alarming message to the authorities. Soviet
leaders feared a repetition of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution where, they
argued, intellectual turbulence was a crucial factor in the armed uprising
against Soviet power.38 Even before Hungary, the Central Committee har-
boured no warmth towards Dudintsev’s inflammatory book.39 After
Hungary, the 19 December 1956 Central Committee letter on ‘The Inten-
sification of the Political Work of Party Organizations among the Masses’
drew unambiguous parallels between the Hungarian events and the activ-
ities of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in Soviet literature, arts, humanities and the
media, citing as an example Paustovskii’s 22 October speech at the discus-
sion of Dudintsev’s book.40 After late November, the tone of press cover-
age of the novel changed from qualified praise to reserved censure and
even outright rejection.42
However, readers rallied around Not by Bread Alone. Throughout
1957, when the official castigation of the novel was in full swing, Novyi mir
received hundreds of letters vigorously supporting Dudintsev and his
88 Denis Kozlov
book. The tone of letters remained the same, and the motif of combating
bureaucrats even intensified. The exasperated readers perceived the offi-
cial criticism of their favourite novel as a counter-attack by those very
bureaucrats whom Dudintsev targeted. ‘Those who speak against you are
the characters of your novel that keep living and working at their old
places. They are afraid to lose those comfortable positions’, – wrote a
group of seven engineering students.42 Even in the army, admiration for
Dudintsev’s novel did not cease in the wake of the administrative interfer-
ence. Five young soldiers wrote to him:

You are a great guy, thank you! [. . .] We were tired, our brains were
depleted; we were entangled in terrible contradictions and only waited
for something extraordinary, fresh, truly radiant and young, while
knocking, like puppies, into the dark, mildewed ‘corners’ of dogmas,
regulations, and other rubbish.
But time began lifting the veil before our eyes, and your book, like
a powerful fist, broke through that veil [. . .].
Shutikovs – go to hell!
Avdievs – go to hell!
Drozdovs – get out of our way!43

The language and self-perceptions of these and many other readers

were rooted in a belief in human progress, a fundamental value of Soviet
civilization. Enhanced by Socialist Realism, Russian cultural tradition
reserved a crucial place in that progress for creative literature, and as late
as 1957 many people chose to be guided by the writer as a standard-bearer
of social and ethical ideals. Readers made literary characters into human
beings and merged literary plots with reality.44 As a result of the audi-
ence’s hunger for the writer’s word and willingness to read literary texts as
political manifestos, the early Thaw, together with the late Stalin years,
became a culmination of literature-centrism and a new peak of realism.45
Yet, besides these traditional features, the audiences of 1957 also dis-
played a new quality – an eagerness to challenge the press when it
launched political attacks against their favourite authors. This widespread
and relatively open defiance of official newspaper propaganda was an
important characteristic of the Thaw that persisted, despite the tightening
of controls over intellectual life, in 1957 and beyond.
So did, for now, the images of enemies. As late as 1958, some readers
continued to rage against the wrecking bureaucrats and their presumed
talking heads in the press. Nikolai Agridkov, an editorial employee at the
district newspaper Radian’ska Pravda in Teplik, Vinnitsa region, did not
like the ‘weak’ end of the novel. ‘The Avdievs’ gang should have been
completely defeated and sent to the Urals or Siberia to build bridges and
mines – to those places where Lopatkin had been’. Agridkov proposed a
sequel to the book: since ‘truth had not yet been completely resurrected,
 Naming the social evil 89
and the infiltrators (lazutchiki) were still around’, the next volume of Not
by Bread Alone could ‘show the neat life of people building communist
society’.46 The bricklayer Iurii Babikov from Tashkent identified the
struggle against ‘clear enemies yearning to slow down progress’ and
against ‘hidden enemies, the survivals of capitalism in the people’s and our
own mind’, as a major part of his worldview.47 ‘Aleksei Sapozhnikov’ – a
pseudonym that the letter writer defiantly acknowledged as a precaution
(‘otherwise you will beat me up’) – compared bureaucrats to ‘swarms of
cockroaches’ plaguing all institutions, from ministries to collective farms,
and ‘biting and eating, eating, eating everywhere . . .’.48
The persistence and perhaps even centrality of the enemy imagery in
reactions to Not by Bread Alone during the mid to late 1950s raises the
question of how the letter writers viewed the Stalin terror. Could it be that
those who produced the abundant diatribes against the wrecking bureau-
crats belonged to the part of society that did not accept Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin half a year before the publication and discussion of
Dudintsev’s novel?
The answer is apparently no. Only in a couple of radical cases did the
supporters of Dudintsev’s book explicitly refer to the Stalin-era reprisals
as a model and usable social instrument. B.N. Analov from Leningrad sug-
gested, in November 1956, a purge like the one in 1933 in order to rid the
party of the wretched bureaucrats.49 E.I. Bespomoshchnov from Voronezh
wanted to ‘apply the Stalin line’ to the Avdievs and Shutikovs.50 Neither
Analov nor Bespomoshchnov mentioned the 20th Party Congress,
however. But in many more cases, the admirers of Not by Bread Alone did
refer to the 20th Congress. Invariably they supported its decisions, pas-
sionately condemning ‘the cult of personality’ and the terror, sometimes
even accusing the authorities of an attempt to bring the terror back.51 Yet
the logic of scapegoating remained valid for many of these readers.
The combination of explicit rejection of terror and implicit reproduc-
tion of the terror phraseology made some letters look grotesquely self-
contradictory. Viktor Matveev cited above developed his philippic against
the bureaucrats as follows:

But it is not the year 1937 today! The 20th congress has particularly
emphasized that the times are different now. The days of the Droz-
dovs’ caste are numbered – but that is why they will, now as never
before, dodge, slander, falsely philosophize, and invent more and
more new theories of self-defence and attack based on Tartuffe-like
hypocrisy. With the help of these pharisaical theories of ‘defending’
socialism, they have long and successfully been defending themselves
and attacking the interests of the people, like the sands of the desert
slide down upon cities. Wherever they are, life dies out. These Jesuits
are the main enemies of socialism, the main enemies of the Commu-
nist party. They are the fifth column.52
90 Denis Kozlov
Matveev’s passionate rejection of the Stalin terror was caught up in his
replication of Stalin’s thesis about the enhancement of social strife along
with the development of socialism. Having started with a renunciation of
the terror, which he designated by the self-explanatory date ‘1937’,
Matveev ended up, in the same paragraph, reinforcing one of the very
central arguments of the terror – the presumption of a fifth column, a
hidden conspiracy of subversives allegedly operating within society. In a
phantasmagoric mixture that characterized the early Thaw, the readers’
condemnation of the terror and their earnest desire for change coexisted
with the perseverance of the language and logic of social cleansing. Rejec-
tion of 1937 intertwined with those roots from which 1937 had grown.53
Responses to Not by Bread Alone suggest that those who welcomed the
Thaw in the mid to late 1950s did not possess a consistent and well-
ordered worldview diametrically opposite to a certain ‘Stalinist mentality’
(itself a very problematic term). Rather, the mindset of the early Thaw
represented a mixture of contradictory values and recipes, in which the
new and the old stood in close proximity, heavily borrowing from the
political culture formed in Soviet society during the earlier decades.
The logical question, then, is whether we can draw clear frontlines
between the ‘supporters’ and ‘opponents’ of the Thaw, in the way that
some readers desired. The probable answer is that, just as with the
‘friends’ of the Thaw, its ‘enemies’ would turn out to be an elusive group.
Identifying them socially and physically would be a futile and misleading
exercise akin to searching for the Drozdovs, Avdievs and Shutikovs in
reality. Readers’ letters suggest that the proponents and adversaries of
social change overlapped and could turn into one another, depending on
the issue at stake, political circumstances, experiences, and perhaps even
momentary disposition. The frontlines of the Thaw lay not so much
between, as within, human beings – within the mind of everyone who lived
at the time and contemplated the country’s historical past, current situ-
ation and the immense socio-cultural transformation that was gradually
taking place.
That said, stating the complexity of a phenomenon only partially
explains it. The question remains: what made it possible for so many
readers of the early Thaw to abhor the terror and yet identify with it so
uncritically in their social strategies? Neither the peripheral relevance of
the book’s plot to the theme of terror (Lopatkin’s unjust imprisonment),
nor the fear of touching on the unsafe issue of reprisals could sufficiently
clarify why numerous readers excitedly championed Dudintsev’s critical
message, opted for reforms, upheld the line of the 20th Party Congress and
condemned the purges, but for all that kept reproducing, consciously or
not, terror as a viable social instrument.
An explanation could be that, in order for the letter writers to arrive at
a systematic and introspective rejection of terror, a debate about the terror
had to unfold in contemporary literature, media and the arts. During the
 Naming the social evil 91
mid to late 1950s, creative literature and the press lagged far behind the
numerous kitchen-table discussions of the experiences of recent purges.54
It was the gap between the smouldering polemic and its inadequate recog-
nition in the media that perhaps explained why, in the letters of 1956–59,
so few readers of Novyi mir openly raised questions about their own part
in the terror – either as victims or perpetrators, or through compliance, let
alone language and mentality.
Whether or not the readers posed those questions to themselves, in
letters they routinely distanced themselves from the terror, presenting it,
usually in very restrained language, as an alien evil superimposed from
above. Those who mentioned any abuses of Stalin’s time as a rule did so
vaguely and euphemistically. The elusive ‘cult of personality’ was the most
common description, probably because it became unmistakably legitimate
after the 30 June 1956 Central Committee decree, ‘On the Overcoming of
the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’.55 The letter writers much
more rarely ascribed the terror to Beria56 or used the self-explanatory
‘1937’.57 Amongst Dudintsev’s correspondents of 1956–59, those who
admitted having been imprisoned were few and far between – five, on the
last count.58 Even those usually wrote about the camps in reserved, reti-
cent language. Former engineer Genrietta Rubinshtein living in Iagodnyi,
Magadan region, who had been repressed for almost 20 years, wrote a
detailed letter about her Far Eastern experiences but (responding to Dud-
intsev’s agenda?) focused on administrative abuses outside the camps
rather than in the camps proper.59 Some victims of terror also used images
of subversion from within and even explained the terror by the wrecking
activities of the same Drozdovs and Shutikovs. ‘The Drozdovs, Shutikovs,
and the like were able to establish themselves precisely because there was
[sic] 1936–38; and on the other hand, so many people perished precisely
because there were so many of those Drozdovs, Shutikovs, Nevraevs, and
Abrosimovs’, wrote Rita Bek, a Moscow librarian whose mother and
father had been killed in the 1930s.60
In order for readers to recognize the connection between the precari-
ously condemned terror and the witch-hunting impulses that Dudintsev’s
novel provoked in their minds, the discussion of the Terror had to become
detailed and nuanced, urging numerous people to contemplate their own
implicit participation in the purges through deeds, words and beliefs. To
reach that stage, the debate about camps, deportations and executions had
to become not only broad but also open and legitimate. And besides the
legitimacy of discussion, many readers were to realize, with the help of
literature and the press, the enormity and pervasiveness of the terror
experience. Exceptions aside, and despite the revelations of the 20th Party
Congress, by the late 1950s that realization was only dawning.
Not all readers of Not by Bread Alone looked for scapegoats. The novel
did lead several letter writers to search for deeper origins of society’s
problems and reject the ‘bureaucratic’ explanation as reductionist and
92 Denis Kozlov
simplistic. I.M. Smirnov from the Crimea wrote that it was ‘only in a
society suffering from grave defects’ that the bureaucrats portrayed in the
novel could function.61 N.I. Gerasimov, an engineer from Moscow, pro-
duced a 40-page-long typed critique of Dudintsev’s book, praising it but
arguing that it did not analyse the nature of socio-economic crisis deeply
enough. Gerasimov questioned the book’s principal tension, the conflict
between a progressive inventor and malicious bureaucrats. In his opinion,
Dudintsev exaggerated ‘the role and significance of a single individual
doing good or evil’ by presenting social development as the work of a few
discoverers hovering high above the rest of the humanity. The other side
of the coin, he wrote, was Dudintsev’s exaggeration of the power of a few
corrupt bureaucrats single-handedly to block the advancement of the
entire society. As Gerasimov knew well, industrial reality was far more
complex than a struggle between heroes and villains.62
Ivan Konstantinovich Rogoshchenkov, a military serviceman, went
even further. Defending the novel in his 50-page-long handwritten
letter/article, he analysed the conditions that might have created the Droz-
dovs.63 Targeting and blaming scapegoats was not a sufficient explanation
for society’s misfortunes, he argued. The country had historical traditions
that encouraged administrative abuse, unrestrained bureaucratic blunder-
ing, and inertia. Back in the early 1930s, the breathtaking tempo of indus-
trialization from above had produced a special type of ruthless economic
managers who cared only about production and disregarded the basic
needs of the people. This type of administrator had survived into the
present, and it was they whom Dudintsev embodied in his image of
Drozdov. Rogoshchenkov did not question the need for industrialization
or the existence of enemies (‘wreckers’ and ‘kulaks’) in the past. However,
today, he argued, enemies were no longer around. The struggle for social-
ism had been won, and administrative practices therefore needed to
change toward a greater appreciation of the people’s needs.64 Given his
attention to the past, one may only guess how Rogoshchenkov read
Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a few years later.
Already in 1956–57 he did not look for shortcuts and scapegoats but
sought more analytical explanations.
For some letter writers, the literary divide between social good and
social evil embodied in the struggle of positive heroes against a variety of
villains was becoming an increasingly unsatisfactory rationale for society’s
omnipresent flaws. As of the late 1950s, such letter writers were still few
compared with the many more who kept reproducing the old and familiar
witch-hunting clichés. Yet the book inspired a discussion, a search for
explanations. The answers were not there, but the questions remained and
they mounted over time.
Responses to Not by Bread Alone arrived throughout 1958, but their
numbers gradually diminished to a handful. Only seven came in 1959,65 and
25, by my last count, mentioned the book over the next six years.66 Practic-
 Naming the social evil 93
ally all of them supported the book, but the broad and heated discussion
had clearly subsided. In January 1965, a Moscow stenographer A. Vasil’eva
remembered how enthusiastically readers had greeted the novel eight years
before. She complained: ‘Not by Bread Alone is now completely forgotten
by many, and young people do not know it at all’. It was clear to her that
‘the Drozdovs and Agievs [sic] had gained the upper hand and did their
best to finish off the novel’.67 Professor S.P. Khromov from the Moscow
University still admired the book eight years after its publication, not only
because of its social charge but also because of Dudintsev’s ‘tense mastery
and art of precise and fine exterior portrait combined with psychological
analysis’.68 Both Vasil’eva and Khromov suggested that the novel be repub-
lished, and Khromov even used the word ‘rehabilitate’, arguing that
Dudintsev was ‘one of the last victims of the cult of personality’.69
Contrary to their expectations, Novyi mir reacted coldly. Professor
Khromov received a note from Aleksandr Tvardovskii himself stating: ‘I
do not share your apologetic evaluation of Dudintsev’ novel Not by Bread
Alone. Despite its many strong aspects, it strikes me as largely false and
tendentious’.70 Tvardovskii’s deputy Aleksei Kondratovich (1920–84)
replied to Vasil’eva that the book ‘had done its job’ and hardly needed
republication, – which exasperated her so much that she wrote back asking
whether ‘doing its job’ was the sole purpose of a work of literature.71 A
similar response from Kondratovich urged Konstantin Evseevich Gor-
pinich, a physics teacher in the town of Kriukov-on-the-Dnieper, to write
to Novyi mir that the intellectual process begun by Dudintsev’s novel was
ongoing, and regardless of official evaluations no one could stop that
process.72
It could be this very process that undermined the readers’ admiration
for Not by Bread Alone. Some indeed kept praising the novel as late as the
mid-1960s. The difference, besides diminishing numbers, was that back in
1956–59 many favourable responses came from young people, mostly
college students and soldiers. In the 1960s, every admirer of Dudintsev
who identified his/her age was 50 and older, perhaps confirming the
stenographer Vasil’eva’s comment that youth no longer knew Dudintsev’s
book.73 To some extent, the maturity of the letter writers in the 1960s
reflected the overall ageing of Novyi mir’s active reading audience during
Tvardovskii’s second editorship (1958–70) and the nature of Tvardovskii’s
literary project that emphasized remembrance and historical conscious-
ness – themes to which experienced audiences were possibly more recep-
tive than youth.74 Yet the probability that Dudintsev’s younger readers of
1956–57 did not return to his book a few years later suggests that, in their
eyes, the book had become obsolete. Characteristically, the novel was
republished in 1968, 1979 and during perestroika, but never again evoked a
resonance comparable with that of the 1950s.75
It was for good reason that Not by Bread Alone lost its readers. From
the early 1960s onwards, largely due to such publications as Solzhenitsyn’s
94 Denis Kozlov
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Il’ia Ehrenburg’s memoir
People, Years, Life, the audiences engaged in a widespread and fairly open
discussion of the terror.76 Now, perhaps as never before, readers recog-
nized the country’s troubles as structural and deep-seated, and their exam-
ination became increasingly retrospective and introspective. The mirage of
noble innovators and callous bureaucrats began evaporating into thin air
as people began questioning the mechanistic and exclusionary social
recipes that had once been so popular. Engineer G. Levin, 52, from Kara-
ganda, who had spent ten years in the prison camps, remembered Dudint-
sev’s book in his letter to Solzhenitsyn: ‘We still have fresh memories of
the attacks on V. Dudintsev for his Not by Bread Alone, – which, com-
pared to your story [One Day], is merely a children’s fairy tale’.77
In the 1960s, enemy images did not entirely disappear. Yet naming
scapegoats became increasingly unacceptable even as a rhetorical solution
for society’s problems. The intense discussions of the terror and the
country’s overall historical experience compromised the very idea and lan-
guage of scapegoating. The debates of the Thaw, to which Dudintsev so
powerfully contributed, outgrew the agenda of his novel.
The readers’ polemic about Not by Bread Alone, the book that became
a symbol of its time, owed much of its language and imagery to the culture
of political violence that had taken shape in the Russian and Soviet civil-
ization at least since the turn of the 20th century and matured under
Stalin. The dismantling of that culture, the erosion of the terror mentality,
was a lengthy process that only slowly, gradually – yet steadily – developed
during the Thaw. In the mid to late 1950s, most admirers of Dudintsev’s
novel still followed the old social recipes and paradigms. At the same time,
Not by Bread Alone intensified a massive socio-intellectual fermentation, a
range of discussions and thoughts that eventually transcended the book’s
conceptual framework. The debate that the novel provoked was, in scale
and intensity, perhaps unprecedented in Soviet culture. It was this debate
that carried the potential for transforming the minds of many readers and
urging them to part with old stereotypes.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eleonor Gilburd, Lynne Viola, the participants of
the University of Toronto Russian Studies Workshop, and the editor for
very helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes
1 V. Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, 1956, no. 8, 31–118; Ibid., no.
9, 37–118; Ibid., no. 10, 21–98. Novyi mir’s print run was 140,000. The novel was
also published as a book by Sovetskii pisatel’ in 1957 (print run, 30,000).
2 RGALI, 1702/6/242/111.
 Naming the social evil 95
3 RGALI, 1702/6/240/37 (Novosibirsk), l. 85 (Tashkent); d. 241, l. 67 (L’vov
region), l. 117 (Kostroma); d. 243, l. 25 (Yalta); d. 245, l. 57 (Leningrad); op. 8,
d. 127, l. 222 (Velikie Luki); d. 134, l. 14 (Minsk); d. 136, l. 18 (Kazan’); d. 268, l.
15 (Odessa).
4 RGALI, 1702/8/133/132 (Baku).
5 RGALI, 1702/6/240/15; d. 241, l. 16.
6 RGALI, 1702/6/242/22-23; d. 243, l. 121 (Magnitogorsk).
7 RGALI, 1702/6/241/16 (Gomel’), l. 76 (Molotov region); d. 242, l. 128 (Kiev);
op. 8, d. 131, l. 4 (Leningrad).
8 For a translation of most of Paustovskii’s speech, see H. McLean, W. Vickery
(eds), The Year of Protest, 1956: An Anthology of Soviet Literary Materials,
New York: Vintage Books, 1961, pp. 155–9. For eyewitnesses’ memoirs, see V.
Dudintsev, Mezhdu dvumia romanami, Saint Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’, 2000,
pp. 9–14; N. Bianki, K. Simonov, A. Tvardovskii v ‘Novom mire’: Vospomi-
naniia, Moscow: Violanta, 1999, p. 186; E. Dolmatovskii, ‘I Didn’t Sleep All
Night Because of You’, Russian Studies in History, vol. 38, no. 4, 2000, 7–20.
For an archivally based discussion, see K. Loewenstein, ‘The Thaw: Writers
and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union 1951–57’, PhD Diss., Duke Univer-
sity, 1999, pp. 299–311.
9 For a persuasive discussion of continuity between Stalin-era and early post-
Stalin (1950s) fiction, see K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 216–20; idem, ‘The Chang-
ing Image of Science and Technology in Soviet Literature’, in L. Graham (ed.),
Science and Soviet Social Order, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1990, pp. 259–98, esp. pp. 280–4. Compared with the 1950s, Clark observes
much more significant departures from Socialist Realist clichés in Soviet fiction
during the 1960s.
10 Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, no. 10, October 1956, p. 97.
11 B. Platonov, ‘Real’nye geroi i literaturnye skhemy’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 24
November 1956; Clark, Soviet Novel, 218–20; idem, ‘The Changing Image of
Science’, 282.
12 Clark, Soviet Novel, p. 217; R. Chapple, ‘Vladimir Dudintsev as Innovator and
Barometer of His Time’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, vol. 6,
no. 2, 1992, pp. 1–19, esp. pp. 1–8.
13 See Susanne Schattenberg’s article in this collection.
14 A. Bek, ‘Zhizn’ Berezhkova’, Novyi mir, 1956, nos. 1–5; D. Granin, ‘Sobstven-
noe mnenie’, Novyi mir, 1956, no. 8, pp. 129–36.
15 TsGALI SPb, 107/3/41/1-64.
16 TsGALI SPb, 107/3/41/45.
17 Two last responses were dated May 1965: RGALI, 1702/9/178/52 (Moscow, 13
May 1965); RGALI, 1702/10/250/64-67 (Zaporozh’e, registered 14 May 1965).
18 RGALI, 1702/6/240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245 (entire); 1702/8/10, 11, 127, 128, 129,
130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 267, 268, 279, 404, 405 (entire); d. 735, ll.
63–4; 1702/9/82/32-33ob, 144–5; d. 167, ll. 13-18ob, 27–30; d. 176, ll. 19–20; d.
178, ll. 7-16ob, 52, 79-79ob; RGALI, 1702/10/1/170; d. 2, ll. 49–50; d. 3, ll. 4–7,
18; d. 74, ll. 14-14ob, 44–53; d. 75, ll. 7-14ob, 69-70ob; d. 76, ll. 43-43ob, 67-67ob;
d. 78, ll. 94-113ob; d. 79, ll. 76–77, 85-86ob; d. 83, l. 55, 191–2; d. 173, ll. 136-
136ob; d. 250, ll. 64–7. The numbers of letters and letter writers do not match
because one letter sometimes had several authors; conversely, one reader
sometimes wrote several letters.
19 The count on both Solzhenitsyn and Dudintsev is not definitive, as record-
keeping practices may have differed under Simonov and Tvardovskii and
between publications. And, of course, my database may be incomplete.
20 For Novyi mir readers’ social portrait, see my dissertation, ‘The Readers of
96 Denis Kozlov
Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical
Consciousness’, PhD Diss., University of Toronto, 2005.
21 RGALI, 1702/6/243/27.
22 RGALI, 634/4/1271/1-53, esp. 14a–17, 42–7; GARF, 1244/1/178/7-33, 132–40.
On 13 and 27–28 December, 1956, Izvestiia’s party organization reprimanded
those journalists who praised Dudintsev’s novel. TsAODM, 453/2/27/87-88,
104–6, 133, 159, 220–31, 233, 235.
23 On positive heroes in Socialist Realist literature, see K. Clark, ‘Socialist
Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero’, in T. Lahusen, E.
Dobrenko (eds), Socialist Realism without Shores, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997, pp. 27–50.
24 RGALI, 1702/6/241/15.
25 RGALI, 1702/6/241/15.
26 RGALI, 1702/6/241/16.
27 For the traditional targeting of bureaucrats in Soviet literature and press, see
Clark, Soviet Novel, pp. 75–9, 203; S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution as Class
War’, in idem, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 115–48.
28 RGALI, 1702/6/245/91-92 (original emphasis).
29 For reactions to the terror, see S. Fitzpatrick, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat:
Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian
Review, 1993, vol. 52, 299–320.
30 See, e.g., ‘Dozhdetsia li tokar’ N. Smirnov otveta ot ministra A. Kostousova?’
Promyshlenno-ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 13 May 1956; ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verk-
hovnogo Soveta SSSR O nagrazhdenii tov. Kostousova A.I. ordenom Lenina’,
Pravda, 6 October 1956.
31 RGALI, 1702/6/241/53.
32 Engineers and technical specialists were one of Dudintsev’s largest constituen-
cies – over 110 letter writers (13.6 per cent of total and 21.7 per cent of letter
writers with identified occupations). In addition, at least 22 inventors (mostly
unaffiliated) and 30 workers wrote.
33 RGALI, 1702/6/244/63, 67–8.
34 On the rhetoric of social hygiene and cleansing, see A. Weiner, Making Sense
of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 34–7; J. Brooks, Thank You,
Comrade Stalin. Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 51, 128–46.
35 On ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ as fundamental to Russian revolutionary culture,
see K. Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 16–23, 66.
36 On the ethical and in Igal Halfin’s argument, eschatological dimension of the
terror of 1934–38, see Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin!, pp. 139–48; I.
Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003, esp. pp. 7–42.
37 On ‘unmasking’, see S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in
the Russian Village after Collectivization, New York: Oxford University Press,
1994, pp. 239; idem, ‘Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Impos-
ture in 20th-Century Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History, vol. 2, no. 3, 2001, 469–87, esp. 477–80; on the rhetoric of enemy elu-
siveness developed around 1937, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, p. 35.
38 On the Soviet overestimation of the role of intellectuals in the Hungarian
Revolution, see J. Granville, The First Domino: International Decision-Making
during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 2004, pp. 19, 42–3.
 Naming the social evil 97
39 ‘Zapiska otdela nauki, shkol i kul’tury TsK KPSS po RSFSR ‘O ser’eznykh ide-
ologicheskikh nedostatkakh v sovremennoi sovetskoi literature’, 26 September
1956, in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura. 1953–1957: Dokumenty, Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 2001, p. 537.
40 ‘Pis’mo TsK KPSS “Ob usilenii politicheskoi raboty partiinykh organizatsii v
massakh i presechenii vylazok antisovetskikh vrazhdebnykh elementov” ’, 19
December 1956, in Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK
KPSS i drugie materialy, vol. 2, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’,
2003, p. 210.
41 Analysing the press reactions to Not by Bread Alone is beyond the scope of this
work. See, e.g., ‘Obsuzhdaem novye knigi’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 October
1956; Platonov, ‘Real’nye geroi i literaturnye skhemy’; N. Kriuchkova, ‘O
romane ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Izvestiia, 2 December 1956; ‘Literatura sluzhit
narodu’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 December 1956; D. Eremin, ‘Chem zhiv che-
lovek?’, Oktiabr’, no. 12, December 1956, 166–73; ‘Pod znamenem kommunis-
ticheskoi ideinosti i sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 15
January 1957; ‘Sozdavat’ proizvedeniia, dostoinye nashego naroda’, Literatur-
naia gazeta, 26 January 1957; T. Trifonova, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Kul’tura i
zhizn’, no. 1, 1957, 18–19 (a milder reaction, perhaps due to the fact that the
journal targeted foreign audiences); V. Nazarenko, ‘Kryl’ia literatury’, Zvezda,
no. 3, 1957, 192–204, esp. 193–200; Nikolai Shamota, ‘Chelovek v kollektive’,
Kommunist, no. 5, 1957, 75–87, esp. 80–7; I. El’sberg, ‘Neopravdannoe
vysokomerie’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 June 1957.
42 RGALI, 1702/6/240/41 (students).
43 RGALI, 1702/8/134/81 (soldiers).
44 T. Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in
Stalin’s Russia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997; E. Dobrenko, ‘The Dis-
aster of Middlebrow Taste, Or, Who Invented Socialist Realism?’ in Dobrenko,
Lahusen (eds), Socialist Realism Without Shores, pp. 135–64; idem, Formovka
sovetskogo chitatelia: Sotsial’nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi
literatury, Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1997, pp. 263–4.
45 On readers’ avidity for literature after World War II, see Iu. Trifonov, ‘Zapiski
soseda’, in his Rasskazy. Povesti. Roman. Vospominaniia. Esse, Ekaterinburg:
U-Faktoriia, 1999, p. 672.
46 RGALI, 1702/8/267/8.
47 RGALI, 1702/8/279/25. See also RGALI, 1702/8/268/78, 75ob-76 (Crimea).
48 RGALI, 1702/8/268/60.
49 RGALI, 1702/6/242/79-80.
50 RGALI, 1702/6/240/43.
51 RGANI, 5/30/236/5-6 (anonymous, mid to late December 1956).
52 RGALI, 1702/6/244/68.
53 For the ‘fifth column’ argument as central to the terror of 1937, see O.
Khlevniuk, 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo, Moscow: Respublika,
1992, pp. 82–5. C.f. RGALI, 1702/8/133/103, 106, 107 (Chirchik, Uzbekistan); d.
130, l. 111 (Sokol, Vologda region).
54 On these private discussions, see, e.g., R. Orlova and L. Kopelev, My zhili v
Moskve: 1956–1980 gg., Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, pp. 27–9, 43, 46, 56–60; L. Alex-
eyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin
Era, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, pp. 68–71, 76–7, 83–4.
55 RGALI, 1702/6/240/16, 18, 38, 98; d. 241, ll. 5, 7, 30, 130; d. 243, l. 2; d. 244, ll.
59, 108, 117; d. 245, ll. 24, 33, 43–4, 68, 132–4; op. 8, d. 127, ll. 32, 42–5, 195–203,
225–8; d. 128, l. 21ob; d. 129, ll. 19–21; d. 132, ll. 124-124ob; d. 133, ll. 19–20; d.
136, ll. 70–92; d. 145, ll. 8–12; d. 268, ll. 1-1ob, 75–9. For the decree, see Pravda,
2 July 1956.
98 Denis Kozlov
56 RGALI, 1702/8/130/118; d. 268, ll. 1-1ob.
57 RGALI, 1702/8/127/37; d. 244, l. 136.
58 RGALI, 1702/6/242/22-23 (Novocherkassk); d. 245, l. 81 (Krasnodar); op. 8, d.
127, ll. 148–9 (Iagodnyi, Magadan region), 216–17 (former senior employee at
the Ministry of Transportation, rehabilitated but still living in Magadan); d.
134, ll. 23–4 (Kiev).
59 RGALI, 1702/8/127/148-149.
60 RGALI, 1702/6/242/120.
61 RGALI, 1702/8/127/160-161.
62 RGALI, 1702/8/132/62-102, esp. 95, 99–101.
63 RGALI, 1702/8/127/61-73, 74–124 (typed copy and handwritten original, no
date).
64 RGALI, 1702/8/127/65-66.
65 RGALI, 1702/8/404/3-7, 9, 11, 13-16ob; d. 405, ll. 1, 2, 6.
66 RGALI, 1702/8/735/63-64; 1702/9/82/32-33ob, 144–5; d. 167, ll. 13-18ob, 27–30;
d. 176, ll. 19–20; d. 178, ll. 7–16, 52, 79-79ob; 1702/10/1/70; d. 2, ll. 49–50; d. 3, ll.
4–7, 18; d. 74, ll. 14-14ob; d. 75, ll. 7-14ob, 69-70ob; d. 76, ll. 43-43ob, 67-67ob; d.
78, ll. 94-113ob; d. 79, ll. 76–7, 85-86ob; d. 83, ll. 55, 191–2; d. 173, ll. 136-136ob;
d. 250, ll. 64–7.
67 RGALI, 1702/9/176/19-20.
68 RGALI, 1702/9/178/79 (1 April 1965).
69 RGALI, 1702/9/178/79ob.
70 RGALI, 1702/9/178/77.
71 RGALI, 1702/9/176/18; d. 178, l. 52.
72 RGALI, 1702/9/82/32-33ob (4 January 1962).
73 RGALI, 1702/9/167/13-18ob (Borisov, 59); d. 178, ll. 7-16ob (Pantiukhin, 52),
79-79ob (Khromov, 60); RGALI, 1702/10/75/69-70ob (Gorshunov, 66); d. 78, ll.
94–113 (Meerson, 70).
74 For evidence of the ageing of Novyi mir’s active audience in the 1960s, see
Kozlov, ‘The Readers of Novyi mir’.
75 V. Dudintsev, Ne khlebom edinym, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1968; idem, Moscow: Sovremennik 1979; idem, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1990.
76 A. Solzhenitsyn, ‘Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha’, Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11, 8–74;
I. Ehrenburg, ‘Liudi, gody, zhizn’, Novyi mir, 1960, nos. 8–10; 1961, nos. 1–2;
1961, nos. 9–11; 1962, nos. 4–6; 1963, nos. 1–3; 1965, nos. 1–4.
77 RGALI, 1702/10/2/49-50 (14 December 1962).
Part II
Forging old/new
identities
De-Stalinizing the Stalinist self
5 Forging citizenship on the home
front
Reviving the socialist contract and
constructing Soviet identity during
the Thaw
Christine Varga-Harris

In October 1957, E.G. Khilimok moved into a new apartment at the 122nd
block (kvartal) of Shchemilovka Street, the foremost experimental housing
construction site in Leningrad at the time. As one of the more than two
hundred families receiving housing there, she was among those featured in
a human-interest story published in the local newspaper Vechernii
Leningrad. The two buildings on Shchemilovka being settled had report-
edly only recently been covered in scaffolding; now they were complete
and contained all sorts of amenities. As the stream of vehicles laden with
household items advanced toward the new apartment block, the ‘cordial
host’ – housing office manager G.A. Savitskii – greeted new residents.1
The joyous housewarming was a common theme in the local press
during the Khrushchev period, and the article on Khilimok and her fellow
tenants was typical. Such human interest stories conveyed the beauty of
new or refurbished city districts. Smiling families, first carrying their
belongings into their new apartments, then hanging curtains and pictures
while admiring the workmanship in their building, completed the scene.
Articles on housewarmings also presented new housing as a gift or reward
to workers (Khilimok herself had ‘worked almost all her life’), provided
facts and figures on progress in housing construction, and asserted that
such sights were testimony to the concern of the Soviet state and Commu-
nist Party for the well-being of the people (blago naroda). In a characteris-
tic episode of the housewarming narrative, after scrutinizing the kitchen,
bathroom, shelving and pantry, and discerning the ‘good quality’ of the
finishing, Khilimok exclaimed, ‘Thanks go to our native party and govern-
ment for their concern [zabota] for us, simple working-people’.2
The buildings on Shchemilovka were put into operation in honour of
the fortieth jubilee of the October Revolution. On this same occasion,
Khrushchev elaborated his goals in a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR: ‘The housing programme, drawn up by the Party and the Govern-
ment and warmly approved by the entire people, sets the task of securing a
considerable increase in accommodation so as to put an end to the housing
102 Christine Varga-Harris
shortage in the next ten to twelve years’.3 The mandate to resolve this
crisis was a key element of domestic reform under Khrushchev, who
sought at last to fulfil the revolutionary promise to provide for the prole-
tariat all fundamental human necessities, including shelter and consumer
wares.4 Housing construction and consumer goods production during the
Thaw thus diverged from the post-war Stalin-era concordat that had pro-
vided official sanction for comfort and domesticity to the professional
segment of the population, in exchange for its participation in the recon-
struction goals of the state.5 At the same time, the massive housing con-
struction campaign initiated by Khrushchev did not signify an
unambiguous turn toward private life: presented as a continuation of the
revolution, the housewarming denoted movement rather than ‘settling
down’, and although the separate family apartment connoted privacy, the
home was intended to be a site for the rejuvenation of the collectivist spirit
and the revival of socialist activism.6 Beyond restructuring living space,
then, housing policy during the 1950s and 1960s was conflated with a
return to the ‘normal’ development of socialism, of which material
progress and concern for the populace were but two of several crucial
components.7
The repartition of the living space of the ‘bourgeoisie’, and its national-
ization immediately following the October Revolution, constituted the
first endeavour to realize the goal of housing for the people.8 The commit-
ment to provide housing waned, however, during the 1930s and 1940s, as
capital and resources were diverted from consumer goods production to
intense industrialization and the collectivization of land, and then the war
effort. The inadequate supply of housing inherited from the tsarist regime,
the rapid influx of rural residents to urban centres during the Soviet era,
which overwhelmed existing urban infrastructures, and wartime destruc-
tion of the housing stock also contributed to the housing shortage.9 Exten-
sive construction of residential buildings in the Soviet Union finally
received priority following the Second World War, and soared after
Khrushchev assumed leadership of the state and Party: during the Five-
Year Plan of 1956–60, more housing was built than in the entire period
from 1918 to 1946, with a total of 474.1 million square metres of aggregate
floor space.10 By 1964, the press was boasting that every fourth resident of
the country was a new settler and that in Leningrad alone, more than one
hundred families were celebrating a housewarming each day.11
Letters from ordinary citizens to local housing, factory, military and
municipal government and Party authorities, national figures, and news-
paper and magazine editors – correspondence that was never published –
belied such proclamations about the achievements of housing construc-
tion. This chapter is based on these letters, namely complaints (zhaloby)
and written requests (pis’ma zaiavleniia) submitted by Leningraders intent
on improving their living conditions. This correspondence is contained in
the archives of the executive committee (ispolkom) of the Leningrad city
 Forging citizenship on the home front 103
soviet and stored in the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg. Although
housing was distributed by places of employment and the district soviets,
the city soviet was ultimately responsible for housing allocation. Petition-
ers therefore turned to the Leningrad city soviet to make appeals, while
their letters to other authorities (from housing administrators to news-
paper editors) were invariably forwarded to its executive committee for
examination.12
The same promises celebrated in official discourse were presented in
letters written by ordinary people, but with a divergent portrayal of daily
life. Rife with frustration, the discourses that emerged conjure up themes
of wartime propaganda and bemoan a delayed homecoming or return to
normalcy on the domestic front after Stalinist repression and war. In
evoking persistent hardship and official rhetoric of the past, they offer a
counter-narrative to that of the radiant socialist future depicted in the
typical housewarming feature of the Khrushchev period. They demon-
strate that, despite grandiose efforts, housing continued to be character-
ized by overcrowding, disrepair and extreme inconvenience.13
Housing petitions also present an important mode of interaction
between state and society. Although petitioning was not a novel practice
under Khrushchev – the tradition of writing letters to figures of authority
was embedded in Russian and Soviet culture – the premises upon which
individuals based their demands serve as a reflection of reform.14 In the
more than one hundred cases scrutinized, Leningraders asserted the right
to humane living conditions based on state discourse about revolutionary
promises and official concern for the person, policy tracts related to daily
life (byt), perceived legal rights, and universal conceptions of justice
(pravda) and human dignity.15 The correspondence that was generated
thus indicates a populace actively engaged in reviving the social(ist) con-
tract, an implicit accord that had been severely undermined during the
Stalin period.
Relatedly, petitions for improved housing offer a valuable site for
observing the ways in which individuals defined themselves within the
post-war, post-Stalin context, and identified themselves as ‘Soviet’ citizens.
In the process of narration, petitioners not only delineated the minutiae of
their material circumstances, but also provided autobiographical details
verifying their personal value to the regime, which they conflated with
their identity. The latter served as a means of asserting entitlement to
reward, restitution and repatriation. Indeed, individuals made their
demands by drawing upon a broad cache of public identities – soldier,
worker, orphan, ‘disabled’ (invalid), war widow, mother, Party member
and ‘rehabilitated’. The focus here will be on three key modes of identifi-
cation: ‘soldier’, ‘worker’ and ‘rehabilitated’.
Although petitioners rarely applied the literal Russian-language
equivalent grazhdanstvo, they did employ the rhetoric of citizenship. In
particular, they mobilized the social aspect of citizenship, the right to
104 Christine Varga-Harris
welfare.16 At the same time, pride of purpose bred during the war, or the
feeling of being part of a victor nation, as Elena Zubkova indicates, cultiv-
ated a particular sense of Soviet citizenship.17 Also, the perceived right to
decent housing had been advanced by wartime propaganda on hearth and
home.18 Indeed, the discourses generated in housing petitions demonstrate
a popular preoccupation with private life and suggest that addressing
wartime and immediate post-war expectations in this sphere, years after
the war had ended, constituted as significant a dimension of the reform
process during the Thaw as elements of de-Stalinization such as the
denunciation of the cult of personality and of the excesses of Stalinist
terror.19

Reviving the socialist contract and constructing post-war

normalcy during the Thaw
Features on happy housewarmings published in the press under
Khrushchev increased hopes and shaped requests for better housing.
Many petitioners cited familiarity with construction policy in their letters,
highlighting the role of the media in making them aware of official object-
ives and progress in the sphere of daily life. They also juxtaposed wartime
material privation with continuing hardship to assert the need for long
overdue ‘normal’ living. Petitioners thus presented housing conditions as a
measure of the performance of the Soviet system, and in their current
state, as a mockery of socialism and an affront to humanity tolerated by
the supposedly ‘caring’ regime.
Some individuals asserted a right to decent housing simply by reason of
having been born ‘Soviet’. These petitioners demanded that the regime at
last honour the socialist contract forged by revolution, through the provi-
sion of reasonable living space. The powerful sense of entitlement to
housing that Russians came to feel already by the conclusion of the Civil
War is aptly captured by John Hazard in his 1939 study of Soviet housing
law:

The population had grown to expect that their government would

supply them with rooms, and this expectation had come to be con-
sidered during the first years of the Revolution what might be termed
a ‘right to space’. No laws had ever declared that such a right to space
existed, but in the psychology of the people its realization became one
of the criteria by which the government was to be judged.20

This expectation continued to be articulated throughout the 1950s and

1960s. For instance, N.I. Perevezentseva clearly perceived her right to
housing as a promise to all Soviet citizens. Deprived of adequate living
space, she thus felt compelled to proclaim, ‘Can it really be that I am not
such a Soviet person as are all. . . . If this is not so, then why ever do they
 Forging citizenship on the home front 105
not care about those such as I, who have no living space, I am not asking
for more . . . only the slight possibility to live, eight to nine metres’.21
Indicative of the impact of extensive publicity on the feats of construc-
tion, T.F. Fainberg argued that if it had been impossible to fulfil her
request before, it was possible now: she cited an article from Sovetskaia
Rossiia, which she quoted as stating that due to the ‘fantastic tempo’ of
housing construction, ‘fifty million people celebrated housewarmings
during the last five years’.22 Given their familiarity with official policy,
many petitioners proceeded to ask why they were not benefiting from the
massive housing campaign. For example, A.T. Solov’eva wondered, ‘is it
really possible in our time and in our so excellent [prekrasnaia] country,
when we are doing all so that our people should live well and not be in
need of anything . . .’, that she should be denied living space.23
Some petitioners delineated similarities between the hardships of war
and their current circumstances. Residents at 11 Il’ich Lane, for instance,
cited abnormal living conditions long after the war had ended: some had
lived in their building for 30–35 years and throughout the blockade, and
their plumbing had not been working for years, their roof leaked, and
sometimes the gas did not function.24 In a letter to the public prosecutor of
Leningrad, they exclaimed, ‘we are living through a second blockade’ and
asserted, ‘as citizens of the Soviet Union – we should not be deprived of
humane conditions’.25
Clearly, those petitioning for better housing believed that ‘post-war’
narratives – invoking the war and blockade – still resonated with officials
and would appeal to their sympathies.26 Indeed, the press sometimes por-
trayed new housing as a reward for having struggled through the war. For
example, one housewarming article featured a pensioner who had worked
for thirty years as a doctor and had chosen to remain in Leningrad to serve
her fellow Leningraders rather than accept the offer of evacuation during
the war. She and her four children subsequently endured blockade life,
while her husband died at the front. Her new apartment on Nalichnyi
Lane was apparently erected on the very site where her previous home
had been destroyed.27
Vis-à-vis such published features on housewarmings, unpublished
letters demonstrate that petitioners cleverly manipulated official rhetoric.
Alexei Yurchak’s concept of ‘hegemony of representation’ provides a
useful framework for considering the way in which individuals incorpo-
rated into their correspondence the catch phrases of the regime. Like the
popular discourses that Yurchak examines for the period of late socialism
(spanning the late 1960s through 1980s), housing petitions during the
Thaw constituted a ‘communicative space’ – neither entirely public nor
private – in which individuals collectively exposed to the same rhetoric in
turn created a sense of shared experience, one that in the present analysis
is characterized as ‘Soviet’. However, while ordinary Leningraders submit-
ting requests for better living space demonstrated ‘simulated support’ for
106 Christine Varga-Harris
state initiatives (namely, housing policy), they did not merely re-present
the official version of reality: they concurrently expressed personal con-
cerns, revealed genuine hardships, and indicted the state and Party for
their failure to fulfil their promises.28 Essentially, the securing of living
space was central to individual aspirations to enter back into normal (civil-
ian) society after military service, retirement from a lifetime of employ-
ment, or internal exile.

Forging Soviet citizenship on the home front

One of the most common bases of appeal for housing under Khrushchev
was military service, whether in the form of sacrifices on the front during
the Second World War (the ‘Patriotic War’) or of careers that spanned
war and peace.29 Soldiers attempted to invoke both pity and praise, citing
their losses (of physical health, loved ones and home) and accomplish-
ments (awards and decorations). While declaring that they deserved better
living conditions, they also demonstrated urgent material need.
V.S. Svetukhin employed this strategy in his request for better housing
for his family. Over the course of his petition, he repeatedly introduced
himself as a ‘A Disabled [Invalid] of the Patriotic War’ and revealed that
from the age of 18 he had sacrificed his health for the defence of his native
land (Rodina), and was seriously wounded in battle. Also, he had been
awarded the ‘Order of Bravery’.30 He thus proclaimed that he ‘deserved’
(zasluzhil) to be provided with housing, and could not ‘live and wander
without attention in the Soviet Union’.31 In this way, having served his
duty, he asserted his right to be reincorporated into civilian society.
Svetukhin also highlighted wartime loss and the unfavourable con-
ditions in which his family was living to convey his sense of rootlessness
following military service. Having spent the entire blockade on the
Leningrad front, he had nowhere to return to in his native (rodnoi) city of
Kalinin – his parents had died during the war and his living space was
destroyed by bombing. He therefore went to Leningrad to live with his
sister and her family, and after marrying, moved into a private apartment
where he was paying more than his pension afforded him.32
Some soldiers invoked their perceived moral rights as former military
personnel to strengthen requests for better housing that were predicated
on legal foundations. This was evident, for example, in the case of I.G.
Petrov, who declared, ‘with faith and truth I served my native land and by
law must be provided living space’.33 He was alluding to a government
decree granting housing privileges to officers of the reserve who had
served in the Soviet Army for more than 25 years.34 The homecoming he
imagined had clearly been thwarted – following his discharge in 1956 after
26 years of service, and lacking any provision of living space in Leningrad,
Petrov had no choice but to live with his mother. However, because their
room was ‘not fit for permanent habitation’, he had to live apart from his
 Forging citizenship on the home front 107
wife and son, who were residing with relatives in another city.35 In one
letter, he argued that if there genuinely existed ‘concern for former ser-
vicemen, not in words but rather in actions would they promulgate laws
for their fulfilment . . .’. Instead, he despaired, ‘now I am not needed by
anyone’, demonstrating the failure of the regime to repatriate the very
individuals who had defended it, more than a decade after the war had
ended.36
In addition to military service, many petitioners outlined a lengthy
employment record, in some cases embellished by wartime experience,
thus evoking the conventional Soviet identity of ‘worker’.37 That so identi-
fying oneself might prove expedient was suggested by the press: human
interest stories on housewarmings consistently provided the name and
occupation of the (often exemplary) new tenants featured, the duration of
their employment, and select personal details. For example, P.A. Batova,
moving into a new flat with her son, was distinguished as a senior worker
who had devoted 26 years of her life to her factory and had defended it
during the blockade.38
In petitions for improved housing, some workers demanded what they
deemed to be deserved respite in retirement, while others pleaded for pro-
tection of their health, in some cases as a means of ensuring their further
utility to the regime. F.Ia. Struchkov had laboured as a construction
worker in Leningrad for over 30 years, and was living in an extended
family arrangement of seven persons in a dwelling measuring 20.15 square
metres. Basing his request for additional living space on labour service, he
declared, ‘I gave nearly all my life for the state and ask the state to help
me in old age to rest . . .’. He added that five of his family members were
working for the ‘welfare of the native land’ but had nowhere to live in
peace.39
A.A. Chunaev invoked the social contract with the state and Party,
implying that preserving his health, that of a worker, would contribute to
the development of the regime. Living in a family of four in a room mea-
suring only 11.8 square metres, he asserted, ‘This shortcoming of the sani-
tary norm in space has a strong influence on our work capacity, such that
having returned from work, we do not have the possibility, as owed, to
rest’. Not only had he and his wife sacrificed more than half of their lives
working in dangerous (vrednoe) production, but Chuanev had also partici-
pated in the Finnish and Patriotic wars.40

A ‘de-Stalinizing’ citizenry
On 8 September 1955, the Council of Ministers issued a decree to privilege
with a special housing queue individuals who had been denounced as
‘enemies of the people’ or persecuted by association with those who had
been so designated.41 Since housing was a promise made by the regime to
all Soviet citizens, petitioners who invoked their official rehabilitation
108 Christine Varga-Harris
apparently equated the securing of living space with ‘re-acquiring’ cit-
izenship. Such persons had been excluded from the participatory or asso-
ciative roles of citizenship that others – like soldiers and workers –
emphasized, and therefore sought through housing reintegration into the
body of Soviet citizenry, the reinstatement of their living space, and funda-
mental justice. As with soldiers returning home, a dwelling could provide
structure and a sense of normalcy, in this case after exile and imprison-
ment.
T.F. Fainberg emphasized the moral justness of her being placed on the
housing registry for the rehabilitated. In 1937, her family underwent
repression and her husband died ‘tragically’. In turn, her apartment was
confiscated and she was placed in prison and then exile, where she raised
her son. In 1957, her husband was posthumously rehabilitated. At the
time, she herself was living with her adult son in a room of 14 square
metres in a noisy communal apartment; she wanted to exchange this space
for a separate apartment in order to preserve her fragile health. In one
letter, Fainberg stated, ‘Is it possible that all undeservedly lived through
and lost by me does not give [me] the right to an improvement of housing
conditions?’.42 On another occasion, she more emphatically employed the
tactic of justice seeker, stating, ‘I am awaiting salvation [spaseniia]!’ –
which would be more than the 30 square metres she had received in
exchange for 56 square metres and 15 years of her life. This, she asserted,
would enable her to live out her old age in ‘normal housing conditions’ as
would be ‘natural, lawful and just [estestvenno, zakonno, spravedlivo]’.43
For some, housing literally was a means to have a ‘place’ in the Soviet
Union. This is vividly apparent in the case of A.I. Komarova, whose preoc-
cupation with living ‘legally’ was prominent in all of her letters of request.
Komarova had lived in Leningrad from her birth in 1901 up to July 1937,
the moment of her administrative exile (vysylka) to Central Asia. Having
lost her living space upon her return to Leningrad in 1947, Komarova had
no option but to move in with her brother; when he exchanged his room
for another one, she relocated with him.44 Komarova insisted on being
included in his writ (order) with a right to living space, and ‘legalized’
(zakonit’) as an inhabitant of Leningrad in the registration (oformlenie),
explaining, ‘. . . everyone seemed to look at me with distrust, as though at
an enemy of the people. Such a state continued for me from 1937 to 1957
until I received the documents about my innocence’. Demonstrating that
her ‘enfranchisement’ was contingent upon securing living space, when
Komarova received the document declaring her expulsion to be
unfounded, she immediately acted to exercise her right to register for
housing in the queue for the rehabilitated.45
In general, living space may have served as a tangible medium through
which individuals felt comfortable about raising the issue of rehabilitation.
Nevertheless, among the cases explored for the 1950s through 1960s, the
quantity of housing petitions related to this aspect of de-Stalinization is
 Forging citizenship on the home front 109
negligible in comparison with correspondence in which petitioners
invoked entitlement in association with military or labour service. At the
same time, because rehabilitation was a sensitive matter, petitions predic-
ated upon it perhaps ended up in files other than those of the Leningrad
city soviet. Clearly, however, individuals were reluctant to raise or fore-
front their rehabilitation when requesting better housing. In fact, minutiae
about the spaces petitioners inhabited prior to and following repression
conveyed the tragedies of their personal lives often more vividly than the
autobiographical details provided, while pressing personal and material
concerns predominated over the fundamental assertion of entitlement
based on rehabilitation.
The case of M.A. Zhilinskaia is illustrative. She placed concern for her
personal development and future at the forefront of her petition for
improved housing, which was ultimately predicated upon the decree on
housing for the rehabilitated. Although she possessed two rooms in an
apartment ‘with all the conveniences’, her living space was situated in a
communal apartment, circumstances, she claimed, that hindered both her
scientific work and peaceful living. As a 62-year-old doctor of medicine,
working as a senior scientific employee, she asserted, ‘I gave all my
strengths to the development of our Soviet Science and in old age would
like to live in a tranquil arrangement [obstanovka] in a separate
apartment . . .’. Almost as an afterthought, maybe anxious about the
associations of her past, she added that officials should also take into
consideration the fact that in 1937 her husband, an important war
employee, was ‘without guilt’ (nevinno) arrested and executed, and during
this time she herself endured much ‘torment’ (muchenie). Her husband
had now been posthumously rehabilitated.46

Identifying a scapegoat
The correspondence pertaining to the housing petitions examined typically
extended over several years. In general, the numerous letters written by a
petitioner were often consistent over time in terms of content and lan-
guage, regardless of the type or level of official being addressed. There
was, however, a broad tendency to criticize local bureaucrats in letters to
senior officials, and the tone sometimes became more desperate over time.
Indeed, while requests invoked a socialist contract with the proletarian
regime or proclaimed rights of citizenship based on different ‘Soviet’ iden-
tities, blame for the failure to obtain better housing was frequently placed
on one single antagonist, the local bureaucrat, whether affiliated with
housing, state or Party organizations.
The stereotypical bungling bureaucrat was incompetent, indifferent and
insensitive to the needs of the people.47 As M.M. Tveritinova complained
in a letter to K.E. Voroshilov, the local organs to which she had repeatedly
turned would not help her, ‘rather they occupy themselves only with
110 Christine Varga-Harris
formal standardized responses [otpiski], they do not interest themselves in
where a person lives and how, in what conditions’.48 I.G. Petrov claimed
that the way in which local power was operating demonstrated not
‘concern for the person, but rather mockery’.49
While many petitioners indicted local bureaucrats for disregarding their
right to decent housing, a few denounced them as a danger to the state and
Party. For example, M.P. Smirnova suggested that the officials she had
encountered were akin to those of Tsarist times, referring to them as
‘callous Gogolesque functionaries but not Soviet people’.50 After turning
to the soviet, Party committee, and housing department of her district – all
of whom failed to satisfy her request for improved living space – A.I.
Shvedova proclaimed the following: ‘A DANGEROUS SICKNESS, THE
NAME OF WHICH IS BUREAUCRATISM, HAS PENETRATED
INTO THE PORES NOT ONLY OF THE STATE, BUT ALSO OF
THE PARTY APPARATUS’.51
The tendency of citizens to blame inadequacies in housing on proxi-
mate powers rather than officials in the national branches of the state and
Party, can be attributed to the fact that living space was distributed at the
local level.52 At the same time, however, directing criticism at local admin-
istrators was a course followed also by the central authorities. Some schol-
ars have interpreted this practice as a deliberate strategy of the regime for
containing discontent, and for ensuring loyalty toward the leadership at
the national level and discouraging local group allegiances.53
The allegation made by Shvedova that the Party had been compro-
mised lies on the border between condoned critique of individual local
bureaucrats and condemnation of the entire regime. In a number of cases,
petitioners explicitly crossed this boundary. Some overtly expressed their
lack of faith in the system. This is evident in the case of U.A. Denisov,
who lived in a damp, narrow room of 14 square metres with his family of
three. After his petition for better housing was ignored by the executive
committee of the Leningrad city soviet, he proclaimed to the Supreme
Soviet of the USSR, ‘I have already ceased to believe in that which is
written in the programme of the Communist Party, that there will be a
separate apartment for each family . . .’.54 In more extreme cases, petition-
ers starkly illustrated how their lives were being destroyed by conditions
contrary to socialism. I.S. Semenova cited suicide, emigration, or leaders
de facto honouring the laws of the state as potential solutions to her des-
perate living conditions, given the indifference of local officials to her
request for better housing. In a letter to Izvestiia, she lamented ‘they do
not help as . . . we are not living, but rather we are dragging out a miser-
able existence and it is better to die immediately than lead it slowly. Such
is our life, like death’.55
 Forging citizenship on the home front 111
Conclusion
In employing rhetoric manufactured by the regime – that associated with
the building of socialism or ‘concern for the person’ – the discourses that
surfaced in housing petitions during the Thaw are to some extent analo-
gous to the phenomenon of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ formulated by Stephen
Kotkin in his research on the 1930s: petitioners deliberately employed offi-
cial catch phrases and represented themselves in ways they deemed most
effective to furthering their cause.56 In addition, most correspondents were
clearly aware of and invoked, even if only implicitly, the elaborate system
of housing privileges that had developed over the course of Soviet rule.
The broad range of individuals eligible for special consideration on the
housing registry or for additional living space included leading workers of
state, Party, economic enterprises and social institutions; scientific
employees; artists, writers, composers and architects; physicians practising
in residential buildings; individuals with honorary titles like ‘Hero of
Socialist Labour’; persons suffering from certain diseases; individuals
enlisted in the armed forces and high ranking military personnel; and dis-
abled veterans of the Second World War and the families of those who
died in that war.57
It is nevertheless insufficient to conclude that the vocabulary of the
state and Party was simply regurgitated by ordinary citizens in a quest to
exercise a modicum of power. Rather, the discourses explored depict
persons pursuing individualistic aims and demanding that officials enter
into dialogue with them and assist them; some even vividly illuminated the
failings of the Soviet system. In requesting improved living conditions,
petitioners insisted that the state and Party honour their part of the social-
ist contract – in accordance with policy tracts on housing and proclama-
tions about happy housewarmings published in the press – as they
themselves had done, in their estimation.
This suggests a new mode of negotiation during the Thaw: housing peti-
tions of the 1950s and 1960s, in which both privilege and duty were
emphasized, complicate the line demarcating supplicants (seeking justice)
from citizens (invoking the rights of public interest) evident in correspon-
dence of the 1930s, as delineated by Sheila Fitzpatrick.58 In complaints and
requests for better housing under Khrushchev, Leningraders sought justice
and invoked rights. These petitioners presented themselves as subjects of
the Soviet Union (under the governing power of the state) who had ful-
filled various requisites of citizenship (sacrifice, labour, loyalty), and in
their requests highlighted material conditions, aware that housing was an
‘objective’ commodity due to collective or state ownership. At the same
time, they interspersed (sometimes exhaustive) autobiographical details
and ‘subjectified’ their living space through personal histories of habitation.
The failure of housing construction to keep pace with demand effect-
ively rendered moot the rights and privileges of the ordinary person, as
112 Christine Varga-Harris
local officials simply were not able to satisfy the endless requests for better
housing that they received.59 Nevertheless, through their petitions, indi-
viduals were able to elicit official validation for both their living circum-
stances and identity. Indeed, administrators and commissions assigned to
investigate housing cases verified the appalling conditions and services
dutifully rendered to the state detailed by petitioners – even if alleviating
the burdens of poor housing (i.e. a tangible ‘reward’) was not immediately
possible.
Finally, it is curious to note the continuity that emerged in the dis-
courses employed by individuals petitioning for better living space over
the immediate post-war Stalin period and throughout the Khrushchev
era.60 Whether drawing upon stock images of homes destroyed during the
war or confiscated in conjunction with repression, or of dwellings over-
crowded or in extreme disrepair, petitions submitted during the Thaw thus
temporally propel forward both the ‘return to normalcy’ that some schol-
ars conflate with the death of Stalin, and ‘the psychological frontier of the
end of the war’.61 In continuing into the 1960s to invoke themes of wartime
propaganda like sacrifice for the native land (Rodina), and in combining
an aspiration for overdue normalcy on the home front with the simple
wish for a place to come home to, Leningraders did not merely appropri-
ate official rhetoric about housing reform; they participated in shaping the
general field of discourse about private life and its significance to their
daily lives and their civic identities. Essentially, they placed on the agenda
of de-Stalinization not only material restitution for rehabilitated persons,
but also demands for post-war normalcy and the revival of the socialist
contract. Furthermore, individuals proclaimed a right to housing based
both on the promises of the Soviet regime with its revolutionary agenda
(thereby reasserting official rhetoric), and on a personal sense of entitle-
ment to decent living space, as members of a public intensely aware of its
human rights.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Diane P. Koenker, Mark D. Steinberg and Polly Jones for
their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes
1 D. Sokolov, ‘V chest’ 40-let. Velikogo Oktiabria. Bol’shoe novosel’e’, Vechernii
Leningrad, 25 October 1957, 1.
2 Sokolov, ‘Bol’shoe novosel’e’, 1.
3 N.S. Khrushchov [sic], Forty Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
Report of the Jubilee Session of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on November
6, 1957, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957, pp. 49–50.
4 The obligation of a socialist system to provide housing for the people was
expressed in dozens of propaganda brochures published under Khrushchev.
 Forging citizenship on the home front 113
See for example, A.I. Shneerson, Chto takoe zhilishchnyi vopros, Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo VPSh i AON pri Tsk KPSS, 1959 and N. Grigor’ev, Zhilishchnaia
problema budet reshena, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1963. On consumer
goods during the Thaw, see S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the
De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’,
Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 2, 2002, 211–52.
5 Here I am referring to the ‘Big Deal’ conceptualized by Vera S. Dunham in In
Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1990, esp. pp. 3–23.
6 These aspects of the Khrushchev-era housewarming and ‘domesticity’ during
the Thaw are elaborated, respectively, in chapters one and three of C. Varga-
Harris, ‘Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in
Russia, 1956–64’, PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.
7 Natal’ia Lebina, in her exploration of the 1920s and 1930s argues that the
negative realities of Soviet daily life – from alcoholism to the housing shortage
– were anomalous to socialism (N. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Sovetskogo
goroda: normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody, St. Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’; ITD
‘Letnyi sad’, 1999.)
8 For overviews of the revolutionary repartition of housing, see, for example, the
following: A. Fedulin, ‘Revoliutsionnyi “zhilishchnyi peredel” v Moskve
(1918–1921 gg.)’, Voprosy istorii, No. 5, 1987, 180–3; M. Potekhin, ‘Pereselenie
petrogradskikh rabochikh v kvartiry burzhuazii (oktiabr’ 1917–1919 gg.)’,
Istoriia SSSR, No. 5, 1977, 140–4; and T. Kuznetsova, ‘K voprosu o putiakh
resheniia zhilishchnoi problemy v SSSR’, Istoriia SSSR, No. 5, 1963, 140–7.
9 Khrushchev himself recognized these reasons for the ‘acute housing shortage’
he had inherited. See Khrushchov, Forty Years of the Great October Socialist
Revolution, p. 49. With regard to rapid urbanization, the urban population of
the Soviet Union increased from 26.3 million in 1926 to 111.8 million at the
beginning of 1962. See T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet City (Planning, Housing, Public
Utilities)’, Dimensions of Soviet Economic Power. Studies Prepared for the
Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States, 87th Congress, 2nd
Session. Part V. The Share of the Citizen, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1962, p. 325. Concerning wartime damage, according to official
Soviet data, nearly one half of the buildings in cities occupied during the war
were destroyed. See T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Housing Situation Today’, Soviet
Studies, vol. XI, no. 1, 1959, 2–3.
10 See for example, J. DiMaio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies,
New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974, pp. 20–1.
11 See for example, M. Sapronov et al., ‘K novym stroitel’nym rubezham. Sdacha
kazhdogo doma dolzhna stat’ prazdnikom. Otkrytoe pis’mo stroitelei – udarnikov
kommunisticheskogo truda’, Vechernii Leningrad, 23 December 1964, 4.
12 In 1956, 73.3 per cent of housing was operated by the Leningrad city soviet. See
D. Cattell, Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government, New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1968, pp. 144–5. Although files for only a few
hundred cases pertaining to housing were found in the Central State Archive of
St. Petersburg, the quantitative extent of such correspondence is larger. To
illustrate, one report of the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet
revealed that in 1959, 53,007 complaints or written petitions were addressed to
this body, of which 65 per cent concerned the housing question. See TsGA SPb,
7384/37a/8/1, 8.
13 As one quantitative illustration, in Leningrad per capita living space (zhilaia
ploshchad’) declined from 8.73 square metres in 1926 to 5.18 in 1956; by 1961,
this figure had risen only to 5.89, while the official health norm remained 9
square metres. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Housing Situation Today’, 4–6.
114 Christine Varga-Harris
14 For an overview of letter writing throughout Russian history, see the special
issue of Russian History/Histoire Russe, 1997, vol. 24, nos. 1–2, edited by Sheila
Fitzpatrick. C.f. S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing
in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1996, 78–105; idem,
‘Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation from the 1930s’, Journal of
Modern History, no. 68, 1996, 831–66; and L. Siegelbaum, ‘ “Dear Comrade,
You Ask What We Need”: Socialist Paternalism and Soviet Rural “Notables”
in the Mid-1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 1998, 107–32.
15 These were selected on the basis of their representativeness within each file
(delo) examined.
16 My conception of citizenship is in part informed by the sociologist T.H. Mar-
shall, who delineated the development of three different aspects of citizenship
over the course of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries: civil (entailing
the rights to liberty, free speech and due process of the law), political (involving
the right to participate in the exercise of political power and elections) and
social (the right to welfare). The focus here will be on the last of these, but in
contrast to Marshall, who chronicles a shift from duties to rights, I demonstrate
that the two were intricately intertwined in the Soviet case. See ‘Citizenship
and Social Class’, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development. Essays by T.H.
Marshall, with an introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset, Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1965, pp. 71–134.
17 E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments,
1945–1957, trans., ed. Hugh Ragsdale, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998, pp. 15, 18.
18 On wartime propaganda, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, ‘ “Our City, Our Hearths,
Our Families”: Local Loyalties and Private Life in the Soviet World War II
Propaganda’, Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 4, 2000, 825–47.
19 Deborah Ann Field is among the first historians to address the question of
private life in the Khrushchev period. (D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and
Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1965’, PhD diss., Uni-
versity of Michigan, 1996).
20 J. Hazard, Soviet Housing Law, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939, p. 8.
21 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/759/341.
22 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/68.
23 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/766/69-70.
24 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2065/382, 391, 395, 401.
25 TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, l. 391.
26 Given that their native city had endured the German blockade in addition to
the traumas of war experienced elsewhere, the housing petitions of
Leningraders provide a sense of the persistent psychological impact of the
Second World War in perhaps amplified form. After all, the blockade lasted for
nearly three years during which time the city lost about two-thirds of its pre-
war population of about 3.2 million, and approximately 16 per cent of the
already insufficient housing stock was destroyed. The tendency to draw upon
claims of Leningrad ‘heritage’ is certainly unique to these letters. At the same
time, however, Leningrad was rebuilt within a few years and the post-war
housing conditions that motivated petitioners in this city were ubiquitous in
urban Russia. It is possible, therefore, that the strategies, hopes and frustra-
tions, and senses of Soviet identity evident in letters submitted by
Leningraders, bear similarities to popular discourses that emerged in other
parts of the country. On wartime deaths in Leningrad, see B. Ruble, Leningrad.
Shaping a Soviet City, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, p. 49 and
J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and
Economic History of the USSR in World War II, London: Longman, 1991, p. 42.
On the destruction of residential buildings in Leningrad during the blockade,
 Forging citizenship on the home front 115
see E. Bibis and B. Ruble, ‘The Impact of World War II on Leningrad’, in S.
Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ:
Rowman & Allanheld, 1985, p. 189. The following overview of housing peti-
tions submitted by Muscovites during the Thaw suggests that the discourses
employed by Leningraders do in fact have parallels in the rhetoric used by cit-
izens in other parts of Russia: E. Kulavig, ‘ “Give Us Decent Homes!” ’, in Id.,
Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 41–51.
27 E. Perovskii, ‘Novosel’e’, Stroitel’, 11 August 1962, 2.
28 See A. Yurchak, ‘The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and
the Anekdot’, Public Culture, vol. 9, 1997, 161–88.
29 For a broad overview of the position of veterans in Soviet society, see M.
Edele, ‘A “Generation of Victors”? War Experience, Victory, and the Culture
of Veterans in the Soviet Union, 1941–1956’, PhD diss., University of Chicago,
2004.
30 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113, 116, 120.
31 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113.
32 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/120.
33 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103.
34 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103. Petrov cited the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers
of the USSR of 24 September 1953 (No. 2508).
35 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/108.
36 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/99.
37 ‘Party member’ was another standard ‘Soviet’ identity. However, while many
petitioners did cite Party membership, in only a few cases was Party activism at
the forefront of letters of request for housing. See for example the correspon-
dence pertaining to the cases of N.M. Berezkina (TsGA SPb, 9626/1/291/103-
07) and A.Ia. Shvedova (TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/360-78, except ll. 362–3).
38 S. Zhitelev, ‘Khronika iubileinykh dnei’, Vechernii Leningrad, 19 June 1957, 1.
39 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/44-45, 47–8.
40 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/89.
41 Namely, the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers of 8 September 1955, No. 1655.
42 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/79.
43 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/68.
44 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04, 512.
45 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04.
46 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/151.
47 The ineffective and callous local bureaucrat was a stock image of the national
satirical magazine Krokodil. See for example, C. Varga-Harris, ‘An Unimagin-
able Community? Satirists, Citizens and Bungling Bureaucrats Tackle the
Soviet Housing Question, 1956–64’ (conference paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists, Quebec City, PQ, Canada,
25–27 May 2001).
48 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/187. Nicholas Lampert defines ‘otpiska’ as ‘a reply for
form alone, which meets the requirement that a submission or complaint
should receive a response, but gives no indication of what if anything has been
done, and no indication of the reasons why a complaint is rejected as ground-
less’. The majority of responses to the housing petitions contained in the files of
the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet were of this kind. See N.
Lampert, Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses under
State Socialism, London, The Macmillan Press, 1985, p. 125.
49 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/85.
50 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/100.
51 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/375-376. Capitals appear in the original.
116 Christine Varga-Harris
52 When émigrés who had left the Soviet Union between 1977 and 1980 were
interviewed about their experiences with certain bureaucracies, they most neg-
atively evaluated official bodies providing housing, particularly the housing
department of the local soviet. Negative assessments of treatment, efficiency
and fairness might, however, simply be attributable to sheer material dissatis-
faction. See Z. Gitelman, ‘Working the Soviet System: Citizens and Urban
Bureaucracies’, in H. Morton and R. Stuart (eds), The Contemporary Soviet
City, Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1984, pp. 226–32.
53 See for example, R. Bauer, A. Inkeles and C. Kluckhohn, ‘Informal Adjustive
Mechanisms’, in Ids, How the Soviet System Works. Cultural, Psychological and
Social Themes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956, p. 81, and
Zubkova, Russia after the War, pp. 74–87.
54 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/765/291.
55 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/64. For a discussion of the use of lament in Soviet letter
writing, see G. Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet
State, 1926–1936, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 115–22.
56 S. Kotkin, ‘Speaking Bolshevik’, in Id., Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as Civil-
ization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 198–237. According
to Kotkin, ‘speaking Bolshevik’ entailed a process of social identification,
drawing from the vocabulary of official discourse and creating a ‘field of play’
through which individuals could become members of ‘official society’ (see Ibid.,
esp. pp. 224–5).
57 See for example, DiMaio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing, pp. 122–3, and H. Morton,
‘Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union’, Soviet
Studies, vol. XXXII, no. 2, 1980, 240.
58 Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’, pp. 103–4. Zvi Gitelman defines ‘suppli-
cants’ in the same way. See Gitelman, ‘Working the Soviet System’, p. 222.
59 Most of the housing petitions examined remained unresolved or unsatisfacto-
rily resolved. Some notifications provided no explanation as to why the request
to exchange living space had been denied. In other cases, officials cited the
following reasons: an absence of available housing; ineligibility in accordance
with the claims of entitlement being made; possession of housing deemed ‘fit’
and sufficient in size; and the absence of documents required to verify former
space inhabited.
60 See for example the correspondence pertaining to the case of N.E. Posnova –
whose home had been destroyed during the war – which spanned from Septem-
ber 1953 to March 1958. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/4-35.
61 See, respectively, S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Nor-
malcy”, 1945–1953’, in Linz, The Impact of World War II, pp. 150–2, and
Zubkova, Russia After the War, p. 102. Zubkova envisions this ‘frontier’ as the
year 1948; by then, rationing had ended, pre-war industrial production had
been restored, and the demobilization of the army had been completed.
6 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood
The quest for moral rebirth,
1953–58
Ann Livschiz

Anxiety over the state of the minds, hearts and souls of the youngest
Soviet citizens was a fairly consistent feature of both public and behind-
the-scenes discussions over childhood matters throughout the Soviet era.
After all, the future of the Soviet project hinged on the moral purity of the
youngest generation. Certainly, concerns about children were voiced even
in the ‘lacquered’ world of post-war Stalinism. Most of the issues associ-
ated with the Khrushchev period – concerns about the quality of literature,
juvenile delinquency, educational reforms and labour education – had
already been noticed and acknowledged in previous years. But because
most of the problems were direct consequences of Stalinist legislation or
spending priorities, there was little possibility that any reversal could take
place as long as Stalin was alive.
Stalin’s death made it possible to address the problems already under
consideration with renewed vigour and openness, and with the real
potential for change. Khrushchev-era officials and bureaucrats saw an
opportunity to tackle long-standing problems by instituting reforms
which some of them had long nurtured.1 Most officials were neither
revolutionaries, nor anti-Stalinists, but rather professionals vested in
improving the workings of the specific institutions under their jurisdiction
or tutelage, namely children’s education and upbringing (vospitanie).
Driven by a blend of professional pride and ideological belief in the
importance of their work as guardians of the souls of the future Soviet cit-
izens, some of them were eager to launch targeted structural changes and
reforms.

Crime and punishment

An increase in crime, juvenile delinquency and various forms of disorderly
public behaviour (hooliganism) – a manifestation of a serious problem
with the quality of upbringing – troubled parents, teachers and party offi-
cials. Juvenile delinquency plagued the Soviet system from its very incep-
tion; real or imagined spikes in crime committed by minors evoked panic
from officials and citizens alike. Harsher punitive measures in place since
118 Ann Livschiz
the 1930s could not eliminate crime, nor prevent an increase during the
war and post-war years. In fact, however, although a number of scandalous
cases drew attention to robberies or murders, the vast majority of incarcer-
ated juveniles were there because of the 1947 theft laws. Whilst recent
studies of crime in the Soviet Union point to 1953, or more precisely to the
Spring 1953 amnesties, as the period in which crime increased, along with
public and official awareness of this problem, archival evidence suggests
that the problem, at least as far as juvenile delinquency was concerned,
was already conspicuous as early as 1952. Evidence from a wide range of
sources indicates that 1952 was a particularly problematic year. In Odessa,
for example, it was in 1952 that ‘the civic-minded parents of the building,
seeing a great deal of disgraceful things, hooliganism and negative occur-
rences among children, decided to organize a summer camp in the court-
yard for them’.2 Even before the 1952 Council of Ministers’ decree on
liquidation of the problem of homeless and unsupervised children, as well
as juvenile delinquency, local authorities in Leningrad were gearing up for
‘increasing the struggle against unsupervised children’, which included
both punitive and preventive measures.3
The post-Stalin amnesties and their real or perceived impact super-
seded all previous efforts in the area of juvenile delinquency prevention.
In addition to adult criminals, young offenders were released in a series of
amnesties in the period 1953–57. In 1958, the prosecutable age was raised
from 14 to 16.4 The successive releases point both to an increased leniency
but also to a constant stream of young offenders continuing to enter the
camps and colonies during this period.5 It is important to note that while
public panic and the state’s criminalization of activities such as street-
trading or begging contributed to juvenile delinquency, not all arrests were
mere victims or rebels against the system; it was categories like murder,
banditism, robbery, sex crimes as well as group crimes that saw significant
increases in this period.6
Regardless of when the ‘crime wave’ by minors began, it became one of
the focal points in public discussions about children, youth and the state of
their upbringing in the years after Stalin’s death. Although self-criticism
was an important component of any official discussion, the frankness with
which problems were discussed did increase after Stalin’s death. At a
December 1953 conference, A. Shelepin, a komsomol secretary, declared
that discipline in schools was quite poor, and ‘many boys end up in
prison. . . . We are responsible for this, but no one is talking about the
measures we need to be taking’.7 Newspapers were avoiding the terms
‘street boys’, using the misleading euphemism ‘pigeon-fanciers’ (golubiat-
niki) instead. Another important and new component of delinquency dis-
cussions, at least behind the scenes, was an admission that young criminals
and criminal activity held a certain amount of appeal for some children. In
a 1954 report ‘On the goals of Pioneer newspapers’ Tumanova, a CC kom-
somol secretary announced that:
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 119
We have a lot of hooliganism on the streets and in school and for
some kids, [criminals] look like heroes, which is one of the main dif-
ficulties. [Pioneer newspapers] need to use humour and satire to
dethrone them, to show that . . . they are not worthy of admiration, but
of contempt.8

A similar sentiment was expressed in 1955 by the young poet Anatolii

Aleksin:

[Newspapers] don’t discuss hooliganism and it is a big problem. [They]

should write stories about it. Sometimes a hooligan has authority in
school, such a nice guy, even though he does harm. We need to show
that he is a nonentity, that he is trash.9

A franker discussion of the depth of the problems, in particular the

appeal of delinquency, did not translate into greater tolerance or compas-
sion towards transgressors and disturbers of public order. At another 1955
conference on improving pioneer newspapers, the venerable poet Sergei
Mikhalkov criticized the patently false way that hooligans and their reform
were depicted in Pionerskaia pravda:

An article described a boy who stabbed someone with a knife on the

street, got expelled from school and now he misses school. Like hell,
he misses school (Voices from the audience: Right, right). No, he does
not miss school one bit. That is where the main lie is. (Right!) This is
what’s happening. The editors have not found a new form [to deal
with this problem]. So they wrote that he wanders around and suffers.
He is not suffering at all. And it is necessary, like the Presidium of
the Supreme Soviet when it repealed the ban on abortions boldly,
and equally as bravely, to work on these questions. (Laughter in the
audience).10

Although Mikhalkov did not elaborate on what this new method would
be, he did hit upon the fundamental question of the time – how to deal
with incorrigible wrongdoers, once their existence had been admitted, but
the main repressive strategies had been rejected.
In July 1954, Minister of Education I.A. Kairov touched on the issue of
hooliganism at a conference on preparing for the upcoming school year:

Strengthening discipline is an important goal, but we seem to go to

two extremes – either a liberal attitude, coddling, fear of hooligans
and trouble-makers, or to see in every prank a crime.

Kairov pointed to the influence of adults and the street that needed to
be overcome and punctuated his speech with examples of suicides, knifings
120 Ann Livschiz
and a murder of a seventh year girl by her ex-boyfriend, which happened
while her classmates watched.11
Not everyone agreed with Kairov’s formulation of the problem. Most
notably, deputy Minister of Education L. Dubrovina expressed her dissat-
isfaction – ‘all the attention drawn to it at this time makes it seem like
there is a crisis, but it is not really a discipline crisis, though of course
things can be improved’. Dubrovina did not seem to be enamoured of the
openness with which problems were discussed:

If we are going to talk about major questions of upbringing, then we

must say that even though we do not have a crisis in upbringing, of
course we also do not have great discipline either, and that is not a
normal state of affairs.12

It was not just officials who noticed the problem – ordinary citizens felt
quite eager to express their concern and to offer suggestions for improving
the situation. Letters from angry citizens advocated a range of
approaches.13 A particularly long letter on the subject was sent by a group
of citizens to Bulganin in May 1954, offering a detailed plan for battling
juvenile delinquency. The letter suggested an increase in parental respons-
ibility and social pressure on offenders:

We must immediately bring some order to the schools. If necessary,

open schools with [stricter rules]. . . . In the children’s sphere, we need
to destroy the ‘theory of impunity’. A decisive battle against hooligan-
ism in public places is necessary. . . . People are afraid of hooliganism.
Hooliganism is a form of fascism.

Measures for battling hooliganism included ‘simultaneous efforts

through the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the procuracy, and the press and
public opinion’. The letter also suggested some changes to the existing
system of punishment. Rather than giving a prison sentence for the first
offence, they recommended introducing hard labour.14
Tolerance and compassion were rare in letters from angry citizens. In
meetings with ‘workers’ about school improvement in 1956, citizens called
for stricter measures against discipline offenders. They suggested a broad-
ening of the rights of militia to preserve public order, shipping off juvenile
delinquents to labour colonies, stricter disciplinary measures in schools
and more powers of enforcement for teachers.15 Lack of compassion on
the part of the public towards criminals was an important feature of this
period.16 This makes the attitude of ‘professionals’ on this matter so strik-
ing. Judging from reports, letters and suggestions, those entrusted with the
supervision of the re-forging process of young delinquents continued to
believe in the ability of cultural (and physical) work to reform temporarily
fallen children and youth.
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 121
Education officials did not seem particularly tolerant either. If the
procuracy and militia officials had crime as their sole purview, school offi-
cials had to deal with both delinquents and other children as well. Some
teachers felt insecure and unable to compete against the appeal of the
popular juvenile delinquents. In September 1955, Kairov petitioned the
CC for permission to allow school directors to expel students:

Local departments of education are preventing schools from achieving

great improvements in discipline because they are vetoing expulsions
from schools – this undermines school discipline and creates an atmo-
sphere of impunity.17

Teachers felt frustrated by their inability to control the children or to

offer a viable system of punishments and rewards. They also felt victim-
ized by their particularly disobedient students, who were able to act with
impunity, knowing that they could not be punished.18 Teachers encoun-
tered decidedly un-Soviet behaviour, which they felt powerless to combat:

Children who are not disciplined and are transferred from school to
school – things are reaching the point where hooligan elements insult
the school. . . . Some [of the children] are in school only because of
pensions. A mother receives a pension for her son as long as he is reg-
istered in school, so he is registered. Such [young people] should have
been working long ago.19

Teachers and education officials repeatedly demanded the right to

expel students, raising questions about the possibility of correction and
redemption for all.20 Law enforcement officials perceived this as education
officials’ using such rhetoric ‘as an excuse to get rid of troublemakers, basi-
cally forcing them on to the street’.21
Opinions varied on who was to blame for the unfortunate state of
affairs. Some did place the blame on the ‘adult criminals’, implicitly
blaming the amnesties.22 However, according to most reports and
observers, the brunt of the blame lay with parents, schools and insufficient
party guidance. Since many juvenile delinquents turned out to be school-
children, departments of education were under constant attack.23 Schools,
in turn, pushed the responsibility onto parents, readily providing countless
examples of parental neglect and corruption through drinking, sex and
prostitution.24 Party and law enforcement officials were willing to place the
blame on both:

Most of the problems are due to the unsatisfactory supervision from

the parents (most juvenile delinquents do not have fathers, and
mothers work in factories). There are also cases of morally unstable
parents who influence their children negatively. Of course [such
122 Ann Livschiz
things] would not happen, if the student was under the influence of a
healthy collective [in school] and timely individual explanatory work
was carried out [by the school] with the parents.25

When it came to practical measures to deal with juvenile delinquents,

two contradictory tendencies appeared to be at work – a desire to help and
a desire to isolate them from the rest of the children and make them
someone else’s problem. But as the state continued to wage battle against
‘the street’, which lured children away from their duties and responsibil-
ities and corrupted them, there emerged a gradual shift from a desire to
transform to trying simply to maintain order.

Unthawing hearts
In addition to the more concrete disturbances of public order, there was
also a more ephemeral, yet no less troubling concern, involving the moral
inner world of Soviet children. In the years following Stalin’s death, it
seemed as though everyone was preoccupied with the state of morals of the
youngest generation and the bad quality of their upbringing – from
teachers, komsomol and party officials, to writers and ordinary citizens.26
The Stalin cult was seen as particularly damaging to children. The problems
in Soviet society and the falseness with which they had been depicted in
literature had corrupted children: ‘the cult of personality promoted the
development in schoolchildren of a soulless dogmatic attitude towards
questions of worldview and morality’.27 Children spoke perfect ‘Bolshevik’,
but to the dismay of officials this did not translate into proper behaviour in
real life, as was captured in one library worker’s lament – ‘they write the
most beautiful [essays] about the actions of young heroes, but they do not
imitate those heroes themselves’.28 This led not only to an increase in mani-
festations of improper public behaviour, but also to two-facedness and
careerist aspirations, negative attitudes towards physical labour and a disin-
terest in the pioneer organization and socially useful work.
In April 1953, a party member wrote to Pravda, concerned that the
paper ‘does not notice serious shortcomings in the way children are being
brought up in the school and in the family’:

Is the coarseness of children and young people, their lack of discipline,

disgraceful attitude to socialist property, not to mention mass hooli-
ganism, befitting a country marching towards communism?29

In May 1953 another party member wrote directly to Khrushchev:

Children are our future, but for reasons entirely unclear to me, the CC
in the last few years clearly weakened its attention to questions of
schools and the improvement of children’s upbringing.30
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 123
Implicit in the letter is the notion that moral questions fell under the
Central Committee’s jurisdiction. In 1956, another citizen complained to
Khrushchev that:

The overwhelming majority of young people are amoral, uncultured;

foul language has entered the conversational lexicon; feelings have
coarsened; girls give birth without shame and, most importantly
calmly respond – I am a single mother. But all the population younger
than 47 years old graduated from our Soviet schools, and what is the
result? . . . When are we going to create a new cult of morality?31

What should be made of these wholesale accusations? Was this genera-

tion of children so much worse than the preceding ones?
While the laments about the moral state of children were nothing new,
it does appear that there were some differences in how the question was
approached this time around. ‘No one’ took part in a discussion of ‘moral
upbringing’ organized by Sovetskaia pedagogika in 1947, because ‘people
saw it as an inter-departmental argument among employees of the
Academy of Pedagogical Sciences’.32 Perhaps the political and cultural
climate of the time did not lend itself to a discussion about morality, or
perhaps the readership of Sovetskaia pedagogika was too narrow. In 1952,
newspapers were called upon to ‘be more courageous about publishing
critical materials about shortcomings of pioneers’.33 Morality and public
behaviour were annual subjects of concern in reports on schools.34 But it
does seem that in the post-1953 period everyone wanted to express their
opinion about the morals of the youngest generation in public and semi-
public forums, and also saw the era as more conducive to accomplishing
the long discussed and long overdue changes.
This was more than just a feeling. Signals were apparently transmitted
through official channels as well. In August 1953, Leningrad education
officials talked about the need for improvements in order to be able to talk
about the ‘true alteration of consciousness of young people, about bring-
ing them up on the level of demands, presented to us right now by our
party’s Central Committee’.35 By August 1954,

the appearance lately of articles, feuilletons, letters about amoral

behaviour of young men and women, which disturbed and attracted
everyone’s attention, in particular, put us, teachers, on guard, forcing
us to re-evaluate our work with young people; perhaps [we have been
paying] too much attention to grades and not enough to their upbring-
ing.36

The Minister of Education reported to the CC in July 1955 that ‘lately

there have been a lot of reports about problems’ with the schools and chil-
dren’s upbringing.37
124 Ann Livschiz
But public discussions paled in comparison to what was going on behind
closed doors. Meetings of writers with or without party officials should be
singled out as forums where particularly frank statements were made about
the extent of problems. Children’s writers took their title of ‘engineers of
souls’ quite seriously. In particular, those sympathetic to the issues raised
by the Thaw took advantage of these meetings to raise a number of import-
ant questions. Such meetings had happened before, and complaints about
children had been voiced. Yet it was here more than anywhere else that the
language and nature of the problems admitted diverged from the pre-1953
period. In particular, they focused on the inner world of children not just in
the ideological, but in the more ordinary human sense as well.
In April 1954, a conference about children’s literature, entitled ‘Life’s
truth and literary lies in books for children’ was held. According to the
komsomol Central Committee’s report-denunciation to Khrushchev, in Lev
Kassil’’s opening speech at the conference, when talking about reasons for
bad children’s books, ‘instead of talking about insufficient mastery of
writers, their poor knowledge of children’s psychology and interests, Kassil’
accused teachers, education and komsomol officials of alleged incorrect
demands’. The report also contained a list of ‘incorrect and tendentious’
statements by other writers in attendance. When the discussion came to
‘unhealthy tendencies’ among youth, Iosif Dik, a young writer and a war
veteran, pronounced them to be a product of contemporary life (ikh rodila
segodniashniaia zhizn’). Certainly just a few years ago no one would have
dared to make such public statements. But perhaps the most offensive
comment came from a young poet Iakov Akim, who ‘accused the pioneer
organization of training children to grow up into demagogues. Children all
over grow up to become open adult demagogues, open careerists’.38 If in
the past, critics of the pioneer organization focused on its shortcomings,
this was an open indictment of the primary tool of political socialization of
children. Similarly, Dik’s comment went beyond the customary evocations
of ‘survivals of the past’ to condemning Soviet society as a whole.
At a poetry conference in May 1956, the following statement by one of
the participants evoked thunderous applause from the audience:

We must enrich the personality [lichnost’] of [each] child . . . Forget

the word sentimentality, at which everyone laughs, because we are not
talking about sentimentality, but about real feelings. We are raising
children now who are callous [cherstvye]. These children walk by a
fallen person and don’t ask if there is something wrong. They don’t
give up their seats for the elderly, and it is not because they don’t
respect these people, but because they are callous. Our poetry must
fight against this callousness.39

This was far from an isolated statement – at another conference,

someone expressed a wish that ‘children needed to be more sincere
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 125
40
(dushevnye)’. Parents asked for more books like Valentina Oseeva’s
Magic Word – a collection of short morality stories about politeness, kind-
ness to young and old, taught through examples devoid of politics.41 After
years of talking about abstract moral, uniquely Soviet concepts, it was
becoming clear to some that all the ideological soundness and patriotic
fervour in the world would be insufficient, if the person in question was
heartless. Perhaps Soviet morality was not meant to supplant basic human
decency.

Literature to the rescue?

One of the most striking examples of the new literature about feelings and
cultivation of a greater sense of humanity was Olenka by Mikhail Zhestev,
a writer specializing in books on collective farms and agriculture. The
Olenka of the title is a Young Pioneer, an excellent student and an active
worker in the collective farm. Orphaned by the war, she lives with her
beloved adopted grandmother, until a woman named Anisia shows up on
their doorstep announcing that she is Olenka’s long-lost mother, who
spent the last ten years looking for her after they were separated during a
bombing raid. Though heartbroken, the grandmother decides that Olenka
should be reunited with her mother. Anisia and Olenka grow closer, but
soon trouble strikes. Anisia went into debt to finance her trip to find
Olenka. The sudden acquisition of a new and beloved dependent makes
Anisia keen on increasing her material possessions in order to make a
better life for her daughter. But rather than turning towards the collective
farm, she hopes to earn money more quickly by selling her homegrown
vegetables at the farmers’ market. She then falls in with a truck driver,
who begins to procure produce for Anisia to sell, first from other collective
farmers and eventually produce destined for state stores from other
corrupt truckers. But according to Soviet law, reselling other people’s
produce was considered ‘speculation’ and illegal.
Olenka’s discovery that her mother has become a speculator sends the
girl into a deep depression. Their budding relationship sours. Olenka’s
grades slip and her teachers and classmates are puzzled. Olenka, a good
pioneer, keeps the information to herself as long as she can, seeing it as
too shameful to share. She ‘hated herself for weakness, indecisiveness,
cowardice. She, a pioneer, was living on dishonest money. . . . And she did
not know what to do’.42 Given that the most prominent child hero, Pavlik
Morozov, gained his fame precisely for demonstrating what needed to be
done in a situation when a parent does something illegal, the fact that his
name is not invoked here marks a dramatic departure from children’s
books from the previous years.43 Eventually, Olenka breaks down and tells
a trusted teacher about her mother’s descent into speculation as well as
her plans to marry the thieving and speculating truck driver. The teacher’s
reaction is remarkably muted. He listens attentively to Olenka’s story all
126 Ann Livschiz
the while thinking, ‘Does the girl exaggerate the situation? Maybe there is
no speculation taking place? She just does not like [the truck driver] and is
attributing all sorts of sins to him?’.44
Olenka’s attempt to run away is foiled. Anisia is arrested for theft and
speculation. Rather than experiencing joy and liberation at the news of her
mother’s arrest, Olenka is crushed. She is adamant about visiting her
mother in detention, explaining that – ‘She is alone, all alone . . . She
thinks that I don’t love her . . .’.45 She refuses to run away, bound by filial
duty:

Nothing was holding her [in the village], yet she could not leave every-
thing either. What if her mum needs her? Who knows what could
happen. What if she gets sick, and someone needs to take care of her.
To go back . . . means leaving mom in a difficult situation. No, she
cannot do that. Whatever happened between her and her mother,
running away would be pusillanimity. Yes, pusillanimity!46

Olenka decides to stay and take care of the house.

Fortunately for Anisia, the local teacher (and party member) decides to
act as a character witness for her in court, explaining to the district party
secretary that Anisia is a victim both of the real speculator – the truck
driver, but also of the collective farm leadership, that ‘pushed [her] into
the [speculator’s] grasp’ by the new ambiguous legislation about private
plots.47 The teacher serves as a mouthpiece for Khrushchev-era paternal-
ism and (renewed) emphasis on the importance of community guidance
and pressure to maintain individuals in check.48 Anisia and Olenka recon-
cile in the courtroom in a wordless embrace after Anisia receives a sus-
pended sentence.
Zhestev justifies Anisia’s brush with the law by referring to her confu-
sion and difficult financial circumstances. She descends into a life of crime
not out of an intrinsic desire for wealth, but rather in a misguided attempt
to create a better life for her daughter. Olenka is not admonished for
failing to come forward about her mother’s criminal behaviour, but is
praised for standing by her mother, despite her illegal activity, in the hope
of Anisia’s redemption and their eventual reconciliation. The book
preaches tolerance and compassion. At the same time, Zhestev does not
suggest that domestic problems and disagreements are private. In fact, it is
the collective that helps Olenka and Anisia respectively to understand and
overcome their problems.
Olenka was published in a modest circulation by the Leningrad branch
of the Children’s Publishing House in 1955, yet it evoked a stream of
readers’ letters in the years 1955–56. Certainly, letters from readers were a
widespread phenomenon throughout the Soviet period. Yet, there was
something different about the letters written in response to Olenka,
particularly if compared with reader-response letters from previous years.49
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 127
In the period 1950–53, the dominant book was Pavel Zhurba’s Alek-
sandr Matrosov, commemorating a young man who covered a German
machine gun with his body so that his unit could advance during the Great
Patriotic War. But in this case, quantity did not translate into variety. The
vast majority of the letters were fairly uniform, filled with standard expres-
sions of admiration for the hero and ending with the even more standard
invitation ‘for all other Soviet children’ to read the book as well. Although
it is impossible to know for sure, it is highly likely that many of these
letters were written as school assignments. The flood of letters about
Zhurba’s Aleksandr Matrosov appears to have subsided by 1955–56, if not
sooner.50 But now it was not only the object of the letters that changed –
the content changed as well. The letters in response to Olenka contained a
wide range of feelings and opinions. The book, especially the
mother–daughter relationship, appeared to have touched a nerve in
people and the letters were both highly personal and much more heartfelt
than anything in the previous years. That is not to say that these letters
were not using some of the stylistic conventions of reader-response letters.
A teenage girl from Moscow wrote that:

In this book, problems that have always interested me are resolved.

All conflicts arising between people are resolved by the author very
correctly, as it should be in our country.51

But alongside such generic statements were quite personal letters as

well. One letter writer saw her life reflected on the pages of the book,
recounting her own experiences with an unfeeling school director who did
not care about her and had wanted to turn her over to her criminal
mother. Some personal reflections went even further:

When I read this book, I thought – many students don’t respect their
mothers. What I really liked in Olenka was that she loved her mother
and even when she knew she was in prison, she did not abandon her.52

But the book’s reception was far from unanimous. A group of students
from the Leningrad region wrote a potentially sincere message – ‘We
never lost the sense of pride for Olenka, who left her mother, the specula-
tor, but then returned to [her] during a difficult time’ – which was virtually
negated by that traditional Soviet letter-writing formula: ‘In Olenka’s
place, every one of us would have done the same’. They also took
issue with Zhestev’s choice of topic, pointing out to him that ‘the topic
you selected does not fit our time. In Soviet families such things do
not happen’. However, they did grant that the author wrote the book
well.53 While for some readers, the book resonated in an almost unprece-
dented way, others responded to it in the same traditional standardized
manner.
128 Ann Livschiz
That is not to say that reader letters on books about heroes from the
Great Patriotic War could not be highly personal. There is a difference,
however, between identifying with a heroic figure and identifying with
protagonists in a domestic tragedy. Zhestev’s Olenka offered a model of
family dynamic based on almost unconditional filial love, loyalty and com-
passion – an obvious and dramatic contrast to the Pavlik Morozov-based
model of behaviour that lauded denunciatory practices by the young
against family members.
Zhestev brought up questions rarely raised on the pages of children’s
books. It would be premature to argue that Pavlik was supplanted with a
new model – a daughter who instead of denouncing, felt love and compas-
sion for her temporarily fallen mother, and refused to abandon her even
after her arrest. In fact, Pavlik continued to be fairly actively promoted as
a model for children during this time.54 However, Zhestev attempted to
inject the note of humanity and present an alternative way of dealing
with people who make mistakes. This view of family dynamics resonated
with some segments of the reading public. After years of preaching
hatred for enemies, the Thaw created a relatively safe space for alternative
ideas to be articulated and this was met with mixed response from the
readers. Some welcomed the change, appreciating the new literature that
reflected their problems and experiences. Others either refused to believe
such scenarios ‘in our time’ or continued to believe that such scenarios
were unacceptable for works of literature and should not be condoned,
even if they were well written. It serves as a useful reminder that the ideas
and trends unleashed by the Thaw were not uniformly accepted by the
population.
This attempt to offer models of humane behaviour was an important
component of the Thaw as expressed in children’s literature. Zhestev’s
Olenka is just one example of this literary current, chosen because of
the availability of a large sample of reader responses. In writing Olenka,
Zhestev did not abandon the fundamental assumption about the
leadership role of writers and literature. He continued to believe in the
importance of his writings and the necessity of didacticism as the key
component of Soviet children’s literature, just like the overwhelming
majority (if not all) of children’s writers. Judging from many of the letters
that continued to be written to writers, some proportion of the reading
public continued to believe in this as well. But what the ‘engineers of
souls’ and arbiters of culture and morality did not count on was that the
younger generation was becoming less interested in literary models and
writers’ opinions when it came to how they lived their lives, a phenome-
non that may have started much earlier, but was only now tentatively
acknowledged.
This discovery is captured perfectly in the experience of a Leningrad
librarian discussing a book TVT with a seventh year boy in 1957. TVT
describes a game invented by schoolchildren – a competition for points
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 129
earned for performing good and useful deeds. Doing good deeds becomes
ingrained in children’s daily patterns, making them better citizens. The
boy admitted that he enjoyed the book, and that the game was fun, but
when prodded, he responded that he would not want to take part in such a
game himself.55 Teachers noticed children’s emotional detachment when it
came to works of literature as well, worrying that students were reluctant
to pick topics that deal with ‘thoughts and feelings evoked by the works of
literature’. Rather than writing passionate essays about literary characters,
they brought nothing personal to their writing, hiding behind citations
from critics instead.56 Thus, even when children were reading the appropri-
ate books, which in and of itself could no longer be taken for granted,
there was no guarantee that they would draw the correct conclusions from
the books’ didacticism.57
Writers continued to posit themselves as moral authorities. But children
in the post-Stalin years were not the same as they had been in the 1920s
and 1930s. They did not crave approval and guidance quite as much as
their parents and grandparents had. Some continued to write letters,
particularly to their favourite authors. However, it is perhaps more telling
of the change that those children who were sceptical towards both the
advice and the advice-givers, who in the past would have remained quiet,
now felt compelled to write in and question the authority of the cultural
figures to act as arbiters of morality and good taste.58
A number of children’s writers wrote moralizing articles or scathing
feuilletons for newspapers and journals, considering such work as part of
their mission. Lev Kassil’ was both a popular children’s writer and one
such self-proclaimed cultural and moral authority.59 His opinions definitely
resonated with segments of the adult audience, who saw him as a kindred
spirit and a sympathetic ear for complaints about the depravity of today’s
children and youth. But what about children and young people, his
intended audience? The following letter throws an interesting light on how
such moralizing may have been received. In early March 1958, Kassil’
received a letter from two boys, probably teenagers. It opened on a note
of familiarity with a touch of sarcasm:

Dear Lev Kassil’! We just finished listening in a state of bewilderment

to your bombastic outpouring of your soul [pateticheskoe dushei-
zleianie]. Bravo! You forced us to think for a bit [na chutok prizadu-
matsia]. But our thoughts were not of a cognitive but rather of a
conjective nature. [Razdumia otniud’ ne poznavatel’nogo poshiba, a
dogadyvatel’nogo.]

Judging from the references in the letters, the boys were well read, or to
use a Soviet phrase, ‘cultured’. Yet their knowledge of literature did not
make them respectful of authority or literary figures. Some of the expres-
sions in the original Russian convey the sacrilegious tone of the letter.
130 Ann Livschiz
Listening to your Tolstoyan phrases in combinations marvellously
resembling a literary dictionary, we felt ourselves to be wanderers in
the Paraguay wilderness. Yes, yes. Though catching the meaning of
the beginning, by the end we in some ways resembled newborn
kittens. But that was at first; then things got easier. Evidently, the
grandeur of what was being created knocked this purely literary spirit
of phrase-mongering out of you. [Vidimo grandioznost’ sozidaemogo
vykolotila iz Vas sei chisto pisatel’skii dukh frazerstva.] It seems you
were talking about styles, epochs and beauty. Of course, it’s great that
you are familiar with Sophocles and Hegel, but in the show ‘Let’s talk
about taste’, [we] think that there is no reason to parade these ancient
names to the detriment of our rich vocabulary.

Judging from subsequent comments, the topic of Kassil’’s radio show

that provoked the two smart-alecky boys to write in had been clothing and
current fashion. Exhibiting knowledge of one the classics of Soviet satire –
Il’f and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs – as well as movies and other Soviet and
pre-revolutionary works of literature, the boys proceed to attack what
they perceived as Kassil’’s zealous defence of Russianness. It is possible
that in this case, they were also channelling their frustration with the
fanatical, even ridiculous, promotion of all things Russian in Soviet
schools. The boys suggested that listening to Kassil’’s opinions on taste
and culture was roughly equivalent (and just as ridiculous) to a situation
where a war hero would defer to his wife when faced with an order from a
commanding officer.
The boys alluded to the generation gap, which, in their eyes, also made
Kassil’ (then 52 years old, or as the boys put it ‘getting on in years’)
unsuited for the position of arbiter of taste – ‘It is all a matter of age. And
some day . . . we will stand behind a rostrum and sway an audience of a
million by repeating the morals told by you today’. Generational unity –
one of the tenets of Soviet social ideology – was perhaps a stronger belief
amongst the older members of Soviet society than amongst younger
members.
They concluded the letter with a conventional Soviet advice-letter
phrase, here clearly infused with sarcasm – ‘Explain to us if our tastes are
on the right path’. (Raz’’iasnite na pravil’nom li puti stoiat nashi vkusy). To
underscore their worldliness, or perhaps an affinity for the West, particu-
larly America, one of the boys could not resist showing off his knowledge
of English, by signing the letter ‘Good bay. Good bay [sic]’.60

Conclusion
Whilst the standard set of problems with children and youth carried into
the Khrushchev era, it was the children’s seeming lack not just of civic
feelings, but of the most ordinary feelings – love, tenderness, compassion
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 131
that troubled many cultural figures. Although the Thaw appeared to have
made possible a frank discussion of all problems with the Soviet system of
upbringing, a number of writers seized the opportunity to tackle the
problem of cultivating these ‘most ordinary feelings’, something they have
been long interested in, but not permitted to do. These children’s writers
saw themselves as fulfilling their artistic, civic and, in some cases, party
duty by creating works of literature that would provide models for chil-
dren, whom they viewed as being in severe need of such guidance. The
children’s writers firmly believed in their own importance, as well as the
importance of their writing, not wavering from the fundamental assump-
tion about didacticism in children’s literature. They were quite eager to
take advantage of the relative freedom of the Thaw to achieve their long-
nurtured dreams of moral reform of the younger generation.
The letter to Kassil’ was certainly not a typical or representative Soviet
reader-response letter. But behind the clever wordplay of two smart-
alecky boys lay a fairly simple sentiment that was perhaps far more
representative, questioning the right of cultural figures to act as arbiters of
morals and taste. Such an attitude points to a growing gap between the
creators of culture and its intended recipients. Whilst writers continued to
believe that the requisite transformations and positive change could be
promoted by creating honest literature, indications of the mindsets of
some members of their audience pointed to the fact that the view of cul-
tural figures as arbiters of morality no longer applied. Zhestev seemed to
pour his heart and soul into Olenka, yet some readers seemed to treat the
work as they would any other less emotionally charged book. Lev Kassil’’s
moralizing provoked a scathing and clever critique. While children’s
writers remained locked in the established Soviet framework during the
Thaw, children and young people’s experience was taking them in a differ-
ent direction.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Thaw was the opportunity to
discuss and debate important social issues, with the morality and behav-
ioural problems of the youngest generation of Soviet citizens often at the
forefront. Since many of these problems were attributed to the ill effects
of the Stalin cult, de-Stalinization carried with it great hope for a moral
renewal and rebirth of Soviet society in general, and the younger genera-
tions in particular. Yet, not all hopes for reform and change could be real-
ized. The lowly position of children’s institutions in the spending hierarchy
changed very little. The approach to problem-solving remained largely
unaltered – numerous and at times contradictory policies continued to
compete for scarce resources on the local level. When it came to enacting
change, almost all the Stalinist constraints applied – shortages of funding
and supplies, overworked and underpaid teachers and pioneer leaders,
institutional inertia and fear of consequences for unsanctioned initiative.
Only when it came to discussing problems did it appear as if the old con-
straints had fallen away. Thus, the most dramatic changes occurred not in
132 Ann Livschiz
the realm of the practical, but in the discursive practices and rhetoric used
to discuss problems in children’s upbringing – from juvenile delinquency
to the more abstract notions of morality.
When it came to juvenile delinquency, greater openness in discussion
revealed not only a lack of consensus, both among professionals and the
general public. The continued presence of quite unreconstructed views on
these questions also pointed to the diversity in popular ideas of the direc-
tion that the reforms should take and the approaches that could be used to
deal with problems facing the youngest generation. To achieve new goals
in moral education – the attempts to reach and soften children’s inner
worlds – old methods, namely didactic literature, continued to be used by
writers seeking to remain moral authorities. In the process, an important
socio-cultural contract was broken – not only were some young people
no longer interested in cultural figures’ morality tales, they refused to
play their part as grateful recipients of such advice. If for writers, the
Thaw meant expressing their desire to tell young people how to live, for
young people, the Thaw meant expressing their desire not to have to
listen.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eleonor Gilburd, Steven Harris and Polly Jones for
very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes
1 The speed with which proposals were drafted and presented suggests that the
officials had the material ready, waiting for an opportune time. In other cases, it
was a matter of resubmitting previously rejected proposals.
2 RGASPI, M-1/5/614/103.
3 TsGA SPb, 7384/25/1924.
4 Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststalinskoe obshchestvo, problema liderstva i
transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1999, p. 179.
5 Statistics on juvenile crime during this period point to a steady increase. Deti
GULAGa: 1918–1956, Moscow, 2002, p. 554.
6 RGASPI, M-1/32/803. For example, in 1955 in Leningrad region, a group of
four 14–15 year olds killed a classmate who ‘treated them haughtily’ (RGANI,
5/18/70).
7 RGASPI, M-1/5/546/147.
8 RGASPI, M-1/5/556/27.
9 RGASPI, M-1/32/794/6.
10 RGASPI, M-1/5/599/10.
11 RGASPI, M-1/5/559/192-4.
12 RGASPI, M-1/5/559/229-30.
13 Of course, letters offering suggestions on how to solve the problem of juvenile
delinquency were written even before 1953. Some were quite creative, such as
one from an army captain in 1947, suggesting that the worst juvenile offenders
be isolated on an island off the coast of Estonia (RGASPI, 17/125/559/140). Yet
Stalin’s death unleashed a veritable flood of letters.
 De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 133
14 RGANI, 5/18/55/164-169. One of the signatories appeared to have been a ‘pro-
fessional’ letter writer, penning multiple letters over a period of (at least)
several years to various high-ranking officials.
15 RGANI, 5/18/76/1-3; RGANI, 5/37/45/58.
16 M. Dobson, ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of
Destalinisation, 1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University College London, 2003.
17 RGANI, 5/18/68/121-2. C.f. similar sentiment expressed by local officials in
August 1955, TsGA SPb, 5039/3/2109/43.
18 It should be noted that the student body contained children with psychological
and developmental problems, some as a result of wartime trauma, and increas-
ingly as a result of parental alcoholism. Mainstream schools with their over-
crowded classrooms and overworked teachers were not equipped to deal with
their needs.
19 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/2109/27. For other expressions of the disdain for ‘welfare
mothers’ milking the system, see TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/11/301/106; see n. 3
above.
20 RGASPI, M-1/5/512/11; TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/11/301/106; RGANI, 5/18/74/164.
21 RGASPI, M-1/5/670/40, 43.
22 RGANI, 5/18/70/86 (1955).
23 RGANI, 5/18/70; TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/16/36/15, 16ob.
24 RGANI, 5/18/70/84.
25 TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/16/36/16ob.
26 Though similar letters were written during Stalin’s lifetime as well, there does
seem to be a veritable explosion of them.
27 GARF, A-2306/72/5268/3.
28 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/107/39. The term ‘speaking Bolshevik’ is taken from S.
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995.
29 RGANI, 5/30/5/108.
30 RGANI, 5/18/42/31.
31 RGANI, 5/30/141/148.
32 RGASPI, M-1/7/156.
33 RGASPI, M-1/32/704/58.
34 GARF, A-2306/72/1623/18; d. 1869, l. 342.
35 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/1830/104-5.
36 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/1973.
37 RGANI, 5/18/74154.
38 RGASPI, M-1/32/762/47-48. See another version of this denunciation in
RGANI, 5/18/54/55-58.
39 RGASPI, M-1/32/819. Emphasis mine.
40 RGASPI, M-1/5/585/151.
41 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/65. The ‘magic word’ of the title is ‘please’.
42 M. Zhestev, Olenka, Leningrad: Detgiz, 1955, p. 122.
43 On the establishment of the cult of Pavlik Morozov, see Iu. Druzhnikov,
Donoshchik 001, ili Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova, Moscow: Moskovskii
rabochii, 1995.
44 Zhestev, Olenka, p. 128.
45 Ibid., p. 183.
46 Ibid., p. 185.
47 This offers a fascinating glimpse of the justification of the paternal state and the
confusion that may befall ordinary people (especially women) when guidance is
withdrawn.
48 This emphasis on community care for fallen members of society is reflected in
the campaigns to deal with the newly released Gulag inmates during this
134 Ann Livschiz
period, which, as Miriam Dobson has shown, were not met with enthusiasm by
the public.
49 It was one of the two most letter-provoking books in 1955–56 for the Leningrad
branch. The other book was G. Matveev’s Semnadtsatiletnie (tenth years in an
all-girl school and their journey of self-improvement).
50 Files of letters are not available for all years. For comparison, the book
received 85 letters in 1953 and only three letters in 1956.
51 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80.
52 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80.
53 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/241.
54 At almost the same time as Olenka came out, the central pioneer organization
officials began to formulate plans to create a Pioneer Honour Book with Pavlik
Morozov as the first entry. For more examples, see also RGASPI, M-
1/5/648/145-146 (1957); A. Gusev, God za godom, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia,
1964.
55 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/110/28.
56 TsGA SPb, 5039/6/67/53, 71.
57 It was also during this period that officials discovered that boys were over-
whelmingly reading adventure stories, which lacked the necessary didacticism
and in fact distracted boys from reality.
58 Children did not seem to write such critical letters in the earlier periods, though
some adults did.
59 In his own words, someone ‘for many decades intently following everything
that takes place in the souls of our youth’: L. Kassil’, ‘Po suti dela’, Iunost’, no.
12, 1956, 98.
60 RGALI, 2190/2/439/77-9. Both boys signed their name. Judging from the hand-
writing, the letter was written by one of them, and the other one wrote the
English phrase.
7 The arrival of spring?
Changes and continuities in Soviet
youth culture and policy between
Stalin and Khrushchev
Juliane Fürst

The terms ‘Thaw’, ‘youth’ and ‘spring’ have always enjoyed a strong corre-
lation in the minds of political observers and historians of Khrushchev’s
Soviet Union. Just as the thawing of ice and snow reveals the buds of
spring flowers, which, against all odds, force their way through the frosted
soil, the political Thaw after Stalin’s death was seen as an awakening of
the powers of youth after the long hibernation of the Stalinist winter. Like
flowers, young people were ascribed natural powers that made them per-
sistent opponents of everything that was old, encrusted and frozen in
Soviet society and politics. After 1956, youth once more became the centre
of attention for Sovietologists, who now saw in the young generation less
the spark of Revolution than a glimmer of hope for victory in the Cold
War.1 The enormity of the expectation placed on this new and rebellious
generation of Soviet youth was best represented by Klaus Mehnert, who
compared youth’s mood after Stalin’s death with the atmosphere prevail-
ing among young Russians after the death of Nicholas I. Then, too, initial
reforms had been followed by partial retreat, which ultimately led ‘to a
life-and-death struggle between the regime and the people, particularly
the young generation’.2
There is ample evidence to indicate that the young generation that
came of age in the twilight years between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s
Secret Speech fell short of Soviet expectations for the New Man and
Woman. Youth hooliganism, fuelled by high consumption of alcohol, was
a problem both in town and countryside. The modesty of dress and
behaviour propagated by Party and Komsomol was challenged on every
street corner by fashion-conscious and jazz-hungry young urbanites.
Student reaction to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech was far more pronounced
than the Party wished and political non-conformism was springing up in
dormitories and lecture halls. Yet was this really the arrival of spring? Was
this the result of a liberalization of youth policy? Can we apply the term
‘Thaw’ to post-Stalin youth culture or do we have to develop a new vocab-
ulary to do justice to the phenomenon of generational non-conformism?
This chapter aims to dispel some of the popular myths concerning the
transition between Stalin-era and Khrushchev-era youth and in the
136 Juliane Fürst
process challenges the common assumption that de-Stalinization was syn-
onymous with liberalization. In the first part of the essay I will look at the
various ‘youth problems’ Khrushchev faced in the early years of his rule
and will demonstrate that, while they represented a change in quantitative
terms compared with the late Stalinist years, qualitatively they were hardly
new phenomena. I will then examine Khrushchev’s response to the chal-
lenges of youth hooliganism, worship of Western life-styles and political
non-conformism and disobedience. His policies, many of which were res-
urrected from the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to solve problems by addressing
them head on. The politics of ‘lifting the veil’, however, had their own pit-
falls. Ultimately, they resulted in the same rift between official and unoffi-
cial youth cultures, which Khrushchev had identified and deplored as a
consequence of Stalinism. Finally, I will interpret my findings with a view
to developing a new paradigm to describe youth politics between Stalin
and Khrushchev. Whilst Khrushchev unquestionably attempted to de-
Stalinize Party and state attitudes towards youth, his uncompromising
drive for re-ideologization meant that officialdom started to impact in a far
more intense and intrusive manner on the lives of Soviet young people.
Consequently, our acceptance of the Stalinist/Khrushchevist paradigm as
essentially a dichotomy between repression and reformism has to be
revised.

Khrushchev and the youth problem

Youth was a favourite topic of Soviet discourse. Young people were sup-
posed to embody the spirit of the Revolution, grow into a new generation
of Soviet citizens and devote their energies to the construction of social-
ism. Their youthfulness symbolized the promise of a communist future as
well as a sentimental homage to the young and wild days of the Revolu-
tion. Yet young people continued to misbehave in very visible ways. Tradi-
tional non-Soviet behaviour showed remarkable resilience in the face of
Soviet educational campaigns, whilst old vices that had been eradicated
were quickly replaced with new problems. Overt resistance was very rare
among young people under Stalin, yet youth continuously, and in many
instances unconsciously, pushed the boundaries of the acceptable. Their
behaviour, style and political beliefs challenged the image of the perfect
young Soviet man and woman that was so crucial to the Soviet Union’s
self-perception. The ‘youth problem’ Khrushchev faced in his early years
of rule resists easy interpretation, since it was not entirely caused, as is
often suggested, by political defiance of youth to the existing regime.3
Rather, Khrushchev faced a multitude of problems, which were inter-
linked, but never formed a coherent phenomenon. In the post-war years,
youth came to the attention of the authorities in three different ways: as
hooligans, as stiliagi and as ideological critics and non-conformists.4
Looking at each of these three groups it will become apparent that the
 The arrival of spring? 137
various youth problems were intrinsically rooted in the realities of Soviet
life and thus a consequence, not a contradiction, of a young person’s
socialization in the Soviet Union.
A constant feature of both Soviet life and rhetoric, hooliganism was a
slippery concept variously employed to mean the ‘primitive other’, the
unmannered or the petty criminal. The habit of both Soviet officialdom
and citizenry of using pejorative terms randomly and interchangeably
meant that the description ‘hooligan’ could be attributed to, at one end of
the spectrum, harmless young men dressed in a non-conformist manner to,
at the other, brutal robbers and bandits. Youth hooliganism, although
fuzzy around the edges, was nonetheless an undeniable reality of post-war
Soviet life, and an affront to Soviet morals and manners. After 1948 hooli-
ganism was the only crime category that showed a continuous rise in
under-age offenders, while the overall crime rate was dropping dramati-
cally.5 By 1952, in some industrial regions, almost 40 per cent of all youth
offenders brought to court were facing charges of hooliganism.6 More than
70 per cent of all acts of hooliganism were committed by men under the
age of 25.7 Acts of hooliganism could range from drunken brawls to
destruction of public property to swearing in public. The disturbances
usually happened in public or semi-public places.8 As the files of the Soviet
procuracy demonstrate, parks, youth clubs and cinemas were favourite
hooligan hangouts, where there were almost daily clashes between indi-
viduals or rival peer groups.9
Alongside the inevitable involvement of alcohol, it is noteworthy that the
larger and more spectacular offences took place against a background of
communal living in factory or university dormitories. Several days of organ-
ized fighting between the inhabitants of the dormitories of ‘Tulashakhstroi’
and ‘Shakhtostroimontazh’ involving up to 70 youngsters in October 1953
were typical of life on industrial or construction sites.10 This was no one-off
event. To name just a few other incidents: in January 1952 over 50 pupils
from different factory schools in Dnepopetrovsk attacked each other in
brawls lasting over several days. Police who intervened were subjected
to savage beatings.11 In February 1953 about 100 young students of
the Factory School no. 9 in Kherson beat up other young workers of the
Factory School no. 6. Only two months later roughly 200 pupils from the
Craft School no. 9 engaged in a mass brawl with the town’s local youths.12 In
November 1955 a group of 60 teenagers organized a large-scale brawl in
Poltava – ostensibly because of rivalries over girls.13 Fights would routinely
flare up between several dozens of young men representing their particular
home turf. Drinking and brawling were turned into rituals marking the
differentiation between free time and work hours. It was here that young
people, away from their families and (often rural) homes, were trained in
survival tactics required for living the harsh reality of Soviet post-war life.
Hooliganism in these instances transcended deviance and crime,
becoming a life-style, a virtual counter-culture to the ordered and
138 Juliane Fürst
essentially bourgeois world of Komsomol morals and behaviour. As such,
hooliganism was hardly a Khrushchev-era problem. The historian Joan
Neuberger identified hooliganism in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg as
politically subversive. Yet modern Soviet hooliganism was largely due to
the massive population shifts between countryside and town, the deracina-
tion and social loneliness that resulted from industrial dormitory living and
the increasingly conservative living code propagated by the Komsomol.14
Late Stalinism with its major reconstruction sites and mobilization of vast
amounts of young people into ill-equipped industries was a particularly
good breeding ground for violence. The Komsomol, whose percentage of
worker-members fell dramatically in the post-war years, struggled to
regain (or gain control) of lost spaces: streets, dance squares and dormito-
ries, which were dominated by a value system that tolerated, rather than
condemned, the hooligans.15 Khrushchev inherited this problem, but his
large-scale ad hoc campaigns to rally youth into the Virgin Lands or into
the Donbass did little to diminish it.16
A more subtle, yet equally subversive, challenge to the ideal of a pure
Soviet youth was the growing number of fashion-conscious young people,
who often overtly aped Western style, or at the very least disdained the
modest uniformity of Soviet dress. Their most famous and most visible
exponents were the so-called stiliagi. It has become a common assumption
that stiliagi were members of the so-called ‘golden youth’, products of
increased contact with the West in the years after Stalin’s death.17 Yet
examining the scant evidence available, it is apparent that stiliagi as a
social phenomenon were neither distinguished by wealthy parents, nor did
they owe their existence to the Khrushchev-era Thaw. Rather, they
represented the tip of an iceberg of fashion-conscious and entertainment-
hungry youth, who had been developing a culture parallel to the official
world of the Komsomol ever since the end of the Second World War.18
The testimony of a young stiliaga arrested in 1954 after a dance evening in
Moscow supports such an assumption. Aleksandr Bairon, a Komsomol
member who was 19 years old at the time of his arrest and working as a
mechanic at a factory in Tushino, lived with his parents, worked to support
his family, over-fulfilled the norm of his production unit and was active in
his Komsomol cell. However, since 1950, he had spent most of his free
time studying and copying the latest fashion:

I know that now a coat with sleeves ‘Reglan’ is in fashion, at the front
there is a double coquette, on which buttons are sewn. I saw this kind
of coat when some foreign delegation was visiting the centre of
Moscow . . . To wear broad ties is not in fashion now, therefore I ask
my mother to re-tailor each tie I buy in a shop. . . . In order to have
boots with thick soles, I sometimes buy Czech or Romanian boots and
then give them to a shoemaker to make the soles thick, for example
with rubber. For some reason people think that fashionable hairstyles
 The arrival of spring? 139
– long and straight hair combed back – came into existence with the
release of the film ‘Tarzan’. This is not so – these hairstyles appeared
here much earlier, around 1946. In our time these hairstyles are
already out of date, now we do not do straight styles, but with a
parting on either the right or the left side, with a curl hanging onto the
forehead. This is the so-called Italian hairstyle. They were copied by
some young people from the latest Italian films. . . . My acquaintance
Nikolai, working at factory no. 4005, wears a net over his hair at night
in order to achieve such a hairstyle . . . I dance with so-called ‘style’
and like faster dances. . . . We used to dance ‘atomic’ style, the
‘Hamburg’ style and now it is fashionable to dance ‘Canadian’. I saw
that style for the first time at the dance square at Krasnaia Presnia.19

Aleksandr’s statement draws attention to several factors, which are

important in understanding the stiliaga phenomenon of the Khrushchev
era. First of all, he does not present himself as anti-Soviet or even anti-
collective. His actions run in parallel to his life as a mechanic, Komsomol
member and activist. Nonetheless, his priority in life is his appearance and
thus his individual self. Second, he can hardly be called privileged nor does
he indicate that his acquaintances are wealthy. His solidly working class
background is a reminder that it was not only the purchasing power of the
golden youth that fuelled the phenomenon; factory floors, too, were
breeding grounds for a culture of fashion and display.20 Finally, he con-
sciously avoids using the term stiliaga or otherwise identifying himself with
a set group. Rather, he considers himself a follower of fashion, who hangs
out with other fashion-conscious youth, but frequents public places of
entertainment. The reason for his arrest is a dance organized privately by
a few young people under the cover of a reunion of young tourists –
according to the report, not the first such occurrence. The stiliaga culture,
while extreme in its care to distinguish itself, thus floated on top of a
general culture of pleasure-seeking. Finally, Bairon testifies that Stalin’s
death or Khrushchev-era liberalization had little influence on the existence
of the phenomenon. While very much on the pulse of the moment in terms
of content (e.g. the adoption of Italian chic), the essence of stiliachestvo
was set in place shortly after the war, when a new young post-war genera-
tion was searching for alternative forms of self-identification.
Khrushchev’s most intricate and complicated troubles with youth came
with a section of society that had traditionally worried Soviet leaders and
been the object of recurrent ideological criticism over the years: Soviet
students (studenchestvo). Nonetheless, in 1956, when students heatedly
debated the implications of the cult of personality and critically discussed
daring new literary works such as Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, the
Soviet leadership and Khrushchev himself were unpleasantly surprised.
The difficulty with this particular display of youth disobedience was that
the border between the officially accepted and encouraged and the
140 Juliane Fürst
provocative and forbidden was ill-defined. After all, spontaneity, rejuven-
ation and grass-root activity was what Party and Komsomol wanted. The
idea of renewal and criticism of old structures had figured prominently in
Khrushchevite rhetoric before and after the 20th Party Congress.21 Yet
iconoclasm, generational conflict and criticism of fundamentals were only
a stone’s throw away. Both Party and Komsomol therefore spent most of
1956 redefining their position, drawing borders and limiting overzealous
enthusiasm. Their task was not helped by the developments in Poland and
Hungary which gave embodiment to many demands made by critical
youth. Yet looking at the rhetoric and actions employed by young people
in the wake of the Secret Speech, should the leadership really have been
so surprised? How new were the voices coming from the young critical
intelligentsia?
The most immediate concern of students in 1956 was often what was
closest to their lives: the Komsomol. Criticism of the current condition of
the Komsomol was hardly new or indeed particularly radical. The Komso-
mol had been singled out for sharp criticism in the main address of the
20th Party Congress, which in essence repeated criticisms levelled at the
Komsomol on previous occasions.22 Thus, although certainly encouraged
by the excitement of the new revelations of the Secret Speech, the young
critics of the Komsomol hardly opened up a new debate. It was alleged
that the Komsomol was boring and had lost its drive to rally politically
interested youth. Komsomol members accused their organization of being
a marionette of the Party, inflexible in its procedures and out of touch with
the true interests of young people. In a typical incident, students of the
Moscow Energy Institute wrote an open letter to the Komsomol Central
Committee, in which they asked for a reduction of membership numbers,
bemoaned the loss of avant-garde status and spoke disdainfully of the
‘grey Komsomol mass’.23 Yet while often mentioning the cult of person-
ality as a starting point, such demands echoed those of previous student
generations.
As early as 1946, a Moscow Party official reported ‘difficulties’ from the
history faculty of Moscow State University (MGU): ‘The most wide-
spread form of (students’) “pains”and “doubts”concerns the necessity of
the Komsomol. It is believed that the Komsomol has exhausted itself, is
over-blown and cannot play a leading role. The only salvation is a radical
purge – as long as this does not happen there is nothing to do in the Kom-
somol’.24 At the root of youth’s disenchantment with the Komsomol was
thus its mass character, which had come into existence in earnest in the
war and post-war years.25 It was then that increasing formality, bureau-
cracy and rigidity sapped much of the organization’s credibility. A widen-
ing age gap between base and nomenklatura and a generational fault-line
between participants and non-participants of the war introduced an ‘us vs.
them’ paradigm into youth’s views in the immediate post-war years, which
was to feature heavily in the debates of 1956.
 The arrival of spring? 141
The more ambitious students in 1956 raised their aim higher and felt
compelled to extend their ideas of social and moral justice to the whole
Soviet system – often mistakenly assuming that they were answering a call
for help from their country and leader. The following programme, put
together by students from the Journalism Faculty at Kiev State University
was typical of the demands made by various student groups after the 20th
Party Congress. Labelled ‘Programme-Minimum’ it contained various
neo-Leninist points together with calls for greater artistic freedom and
general human values. The students demanded equal salaries for all pro-
fessions, fewer taxes, expansion of consumer industries, greater sover-
eignty of the republics, free press, abolition of privileges for the elites,
glasnost’ of political procedures, free travel, sale of foreign newspapers, no
censorship and the introduction of workers’ committees as heads of major
factories.26 Such voices could be heard and read in rooms and wall-
newspapers all over the Soviet Union, varying only insignificantly in their
content and form of expression.27
Yet while shockingly provocative by late Stalinist standards, all these
views and demands remained, in essence, respectfully within the socialist
boundaries and propagated what, at different times in different places, has
been called ‘neo-Leninism’, ‘Socialism with a human face’ or
‘Perestroika’.28 Indeed, critically minded youth wrote up very similar
demands and programmes in the Stalinist post-war years – albeit observing
more secrecy. Essentially they drew from the same socialist texts and
observation of Soviet reality as their post-Stalin counterparts.29
At the extreme end of the spectrum of political non-conformism in 1956
lay young people who were not content just to voice their demands, but
also formed independent groups to bring about a better order. The most
famous, yet by no means the only examples, are the groups of Pimenov
and Trofimov at Leningrad State University and Krasnopevets at MGU.
Both organizations rooted their ideas in classical Marxism tinged with a
romantic longing for revolutionary activity and an idealistic sense of social
and moral justice.30 While refusing to stray from the dogma of socialism,
these illegal groups expressed horror at the past, but also implicated the
current leadership in crimes committed against the Soviet people.31 Yet
again, however, youth underground activity was not a Khrushchev-era
phenomenon. A few oppositional youth organizations seem to have
already existed in the 1930s; we have evidence of around two dozen oper-
ating in late Stalinism.32
Undeniably, however, the events of 1956 encouraged students to ask
questions and debate issues, which had hitherto been unmentionable. This
in turn had a snowball effect on the amount of students who dared to go
public with a critical platform. Yet the extent to which such actions fell
short of active protest is demonstrated by the fact that many of the discus-
sions were framed in questions rather than in statements. ‘Why did
Khrushchev not criticize himself, but only Stalin? Why are our electoral
142 Juliane Fürst
candidates imposed from above? What are the reasons for the distrust of
the People’s Democracies toward the USSR?’, were only a few of the
probing questions hurled at officials in those days.33 Agitators and profes-
sors were often at a loss as to how to answer and reacted with defensive
replies or silence. A teacher at MGU denied that the 1936 Constitution
was ever called Stalinist, while another bluntly stated that ‘he knew as
much as they did’.34 The confusion and uncertainty of functionaries and
students alike encouraged youth to raise questions in more public
domains. Questionnaires, intended to be distributed by and among stu-
dents at Kiev State University, demonstrate the intense search for a new
definition of what socialism in the new post-war world meant: ‘Your
opinion on the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia? Your opinion about the
events in Poland? Your opinion on trade unions in the USSR? Your
opinion on communism in China? What is required to develop democracy
in the framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat?’, were some of the
items on the list, culminating in the daring question, ‘Is the peaceful intro-
duction of capitalism possible in a socialist framework?’.35

Lifting the veil of silence

While the youth problems of the Khrushchev era seem very diverse to
Western eyes, they were inextricably linked in the minds of youth leaders
and policy-makers of the time. For Khrushchev and the youth officials of
the time, they all represented the same malaise: lack of revolutionary
commitment and disengagement from the official collective. The problem
might have many faces, and might indeed be attributed to the diametri-
cally opposed causes of capitalist residues and third-generation inertia, but
the cure was to be the same. Re-ideologization, re-engagement and re-
creation of a revolutionary fighting-spirit (boevyi dukh) were the key-
words in the struggle to recapture the hearts and minds of the young.36
‘Everything in a person has to be beautiful’ was the slogan that summed
up the Khrushchevite vision, which renewed the old Soviet pledge to
create a new and better person.37 Yet Khrushchev went at it with a new
vigour and determination that in many ways put his predecessor in the
shade, whilst at the same time attempting to find new methods and
approaches to the problem.
It was characteristic of Khrushchev that the various campaigns and
drives to improve the ideological standing of youth merged together, and
combined the ideological with the practical. Superficially, it seemed that
hooliganism and its related evil, drunkenness, were the first problems to
be addressed by Party and Komsomol officials. In March 1954, the Komso-
mol biuro issued its first instructions about a campaign for healthier living
that focused in particular on alcohol consumption.38 In 1955, the Komso-
mol circulated a closed letter to all Komsomol organizations about the
problem of hooliganism – an action that was common practice in the
 The arrival of spring? 143
Party, but represented a first in Komsomol work.39 Yet these early drives
already contained much that was to be characteristic for youth policy in
the ‘Thaw’ years. It named negative phenomena and put the relevant
information and vocabulary in the public domain through extensive press
coverage. The drive against hooliganism included the active participation
of ‘good’ Komsomol members, who started to patrol the streets under the
names ‘brigade of co-operation with the police’ (brigada sodeistviia
militsii) or ‘Komsomol patrol’ (komsomol’skii patrul’). The positive effect
of keeping an eye on hooligan activity was enhanced by the fact that par-
ticipation in the patrols furthered their members’ physical and ideological
involvement in official collectives. Finally, the naming and shaming of
hooligans, and their subsequent reform into useful citizens, indicates
the new emphasis on persuasion and re-education that was to replace the
excising and purging of the previous years. Whilst the extent to which
the new youth policy was initiated by Khrushchev himself cannot be
exactly established, the new direction certainly reflected his attitudes and
character traits. He was known to be a straight talker, who liked to shock
his fellow comrades by naming unpleasant facts and figures. Many of his
personal campaigns, such as the Virgin Lands, focused on the mobilization
of society and the subsuming of individual freedom under the greater
collective good. Finally, the de-Stalinization pursued by him involved a
change of rhetoric and practice away from excision and purging and
towards reintegration and re-education.40
Late Stalinism, by contrast, met most problems with a stony silence.
Whilst not shy of putting a wide vocabulary of negative images into circu-
lation, no word was uttered about problems that were not conducive to
furthering a political goal. Crime, drunkenness, hooliganism, stiliachestvo
and political non-conformism remained, with a few exceptions, firmly
behind the locked doors of Party, Komsomol and procuracy meeting
rooms. Yet the seals began to crack even before Stalin’s death – and, inter-
estingly, in the periphery, rather than in the centre.
The Ukrainian Central Committee Komsomol had always been more
eager to discuss cases of hooliganism and youth crime than its Moscow
counterpart.41 In 1952–53 the official Ukrainian Komsomol Russian-
language newspaper, Stalinskoe plemia, began publishing surprisingly
frank accounts of youth deviance, which, unlike Stalinist articles, indicated
that the problems mentioned were general, rather than limited to a certain
locality. In May 1952, it braved the subject of privileged children gaining
access to universities by avoiding the usual entrance procedures and
behaving badly without impunity. The publication caused a storm of reac-
tion among the readers of the paper.42 In February 1953, there appeared a
letter about severe dormitory hooliganism from a construction site in
Kiev.43 In November, a long article about teenage speculation, thievery
and moral corruption was published under the heading ‘When a family
loses a child . . .’, which included the sub-headline ‘We are not allowed to
144 Juliane Fürst
be silent about this’. In the following paragraph, statistics were provided to
illustrate the extent of teenage and youth loiterers – unimaginable for a
Stalinist paper.44 In December 1953, an even longer piece entitled ‘In the
clutches of romanticism’ made it into the paper; it addressed the problem
of teenage gangs, who committed crimes for the sake of adventurism.45
Since this amounted to an admission of failure of the official collectives to
fulfil youth’s needs, the article unquestionably broke the period’s journal-
istic taboos.
It was to take a few years before similar articles appeared in the central
press. Then, however, they came thick and fast, introducing a whole range
of new vocabulary to describe the youth problem: bezdelniki (loiterers),
tuneiadtsi (no-gooders), plesen’ (fungus), parazit (parasite), lezhevok (lazy-
bones) and of course, the ubiquitous stiliaga (fashion worshipper).46 This
last term was coined by a Krokodil’ correspondent in 1948, never to
appear again in the Stalinist press.47 ‘Hooligan’ had made the occasional
appearance under Stalin, yet rarely to designate group activity (its most
common form), but to describe the case as an extreme exception.48 While
the Stalinist terms, such as cosmopolitan, bandit or spy merely joined an
increasingly abstract collection of hostile titles, Khrushchev’s terminology
was descriptive, clear and simple, finding resonance among youth and
adults alike.
However, as was soon discovered, speaking so clearly and loudly also
had its pitfalls. While the very existence of non-conformist youth cultures
under Stalin demonstrates that the Soviet educational effort was never
successful in creating real socialist men or women to match their ideals,
lack of information on how to be different kept non-conformist phenom-
ena in check. The Khrushchev-era policy of tackling problems head on
changed all this. Propaganda intended to show the evils of non-conformist
youth could easily achieve the opposite. Fascination for forbidden fruits
compelled many young people to seek out phenomena promising to distin-
guish them from the grey masses. Nowhere did one learn better how to
dress as a stiliaga than in the post-Stalinist press. This immediately meant
that, on the one hand, the stiliagi movement gained a coherence and
breadth it had never enjoyed before, whilst, on the other, the term stiliagi
– and indeed other negative names for ‘bad kids’ – were applied inexpertly
and randomly, rendering them almost meaningless. As early as 1955, all
Komsomol letters on hooliganism included immorality, cursing, refusal to
work and excessive pleasure-seeking in their definition.49 The terms stil-
iaga, plesen’, parasite and hooligan quickly became interchangeable.
Yet whilst initially it seemed to make sense to tackle all negative youth
images at once, it soon became apparent that, with a dilution of terms, the
propagandistic value of campaigns was waning. In 1956, Komsomol’skaia
pravda felt compelled to publish an article titled ‘Who is the stiliaga?’, in
which it condemned the equation of all types of ‘un-Soviet’ behaviour.50
The Ukrainian Stalinskoe plemia went one step further and published a
 The arrival of spring? 145
piece condemning an overzealous Komsomol patrol member for ‘arrest-
ing’ a harmless stiliaga.51 In 1957 an assembly of journalists in the Ukraine
heatedly debated whether it really was useful to paint style-seeking with
the same brush as hooliganism or anti-Soviet activity.52
Soon youth officials also came to realize that frankness was a very
potent and addictive drug for its audience, who soon started attacking
myths that were central to Soviet self-understanding. The confluence in
1956 of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech about Stalinist crimes, Dudint-
sev’s novel on bureaucratization and the information war concerning
events in Poland and Hungary highlighted the problems of partial open-
ness. In the end, the regime was forced to backtrack severely on its calls to
discuss and name problems for the sake of ideological stability. The intro-
duction of straightforward terms, which described wrongs without permit-
ting further thoughts, was not going to solve Soviet officialdom’s
credibility problem. At the same time, though, half-hearted as the policy
was, it created a new problem. Revelations about the imperfections of
Soviet youth increasingly undermined the Stalinist self-perception of
Soviet youngsters as the ‘chosen ones’ – the constructors of socialism and
the beneficiaries of life in the Soviet Union. The admission of faults in the
Soviet system in general did not always lead to a desire to fight evil; often
it resulted in a feeling of confusion and despair among young people and a
withdrawal into a more private world.53
Even more significant than the policy of lifting the veil was another
campaign intended to solve the ‘youth problem’, also pioneered by the
Ukraine. In February 1952, Stalinskoe plemia published a positive report
about the wall-newspaper of the Kharkov Medical Institute, which called
itself Nash krokodil’ in reference to the all-Union satirical journal
Krokodil’. Its naming-and-shaming campaigns, directed both against lazy
students and the inefficient Komsomol committee, were presented as
exemplary.54 Satirical journalism was the first step in the new policy of
getting young people involved in chastening others, thus creating
community and order at the same time. For this purpose, the old 1930s
institution of the light cavalry (legkaia kavaleriia) was revived. Instead of
the earnest raids against wasteful practices in industries and collective
farms, the new light cavalry were roving squads, who roamed the streets
armed with camera and pencil, producing poster-newspapers, which
ridiculed transgressors of societal norms by publishing their name, picture
or caricature. A Komsomol pamphlet from 1958 recounted the supposed
origins of the revival: the legkaia kavaleriia was re-founded after the 12th
Congress of the Ukrainian Komsomol (January 1956) when in the small
but cosy rooms of the Odessa obkom there was a debate about which
types of Komsomol work were most exciting and effective. Minds
were cast back to a time some two or three decades earlier, and the light
cavalry was mentioned. It was decided to invite old members of the move-
ment. They came for a visit and displayed such an astonishing degree of
146 Juliane Fürst
enthusiasm and camaraderie that the creation of a new version of the
movement was agreed. The Khrushchev-era light cavalry was born.55
While some emphasis was laid upon the existence of a problem that had to
be eradicated – hooliganism, stiliachestvo, moral corruption – it is clear
from the text that the legkaia kavaleriia existed mainly for its members. It
was intended to take young people away from spaces uncontrolled by offi-
cial control and give them an adventurous alternative. In the process it was
to return that mysterious lost revolutionary spirit. While not quite Lenin-
ist, the movement had its heyday in the early 1930s, and was thus untar-
nished by the corruption of the Purges and the stagnation of the late Stalin
years. Yet the importance of the experience of old comrades sent out
strong signals that this movement was not iconoclastic or breaking with
the past. It was firmly rooted in an idealized Soviet past.
The founding myth of the light cavalry was pure propaganda. In fact
satire and raids had never ceased to exist even in the Stalinist post-war
years, albeit muted by restrictions and more cautious in their approach.
Shortly after Stalin’s death, the existing structures devoted to issues of
control and report56 were reformed into the komsomol’skii shtab (literally:
Komsomol military headquarters). Later the terms druzhiny (friendship
units), komsomol’skii patrul (Komsomol patrol), sinubluzniki (blue-
shirts), forposty (advanced posts) were added to the repertoire. From
1954, these shtaby – consciously borrowing military vocabulary and indeed
established in the fashion of front headquarters – took Khrushchev’s call
for self-initiative57 seriously and established neighbourhood watches fight-
ing hooligans, photographing stiliagi, reprimanding ‘loose’ girls and report-
ing their deeds to the wider community via posters, photographs and
caricatures. The movement mushroomed. In 1954, a middle-sized town
such as Stalino in the Donbass had 55 patrols, in 1955, it had 78, and in
1956 as many as 97.58 In towns all over the Union announcements went up
displaying the pictures of local deviants of the public order under the title
‘Is this maybe one of your acquaintances?’, thus shaming not only the
offender, but his social environment and family. In Leningrad, a komso-
mol’skii shtab patrolling Nevskii Prospekt went even further, engaging
physically with the hooligans they encountered, for which they were
awarded with a positive article in the journal Sovetskaia militsia.59
Unlike the brigady sodeistvii militsii,60 the komsomol’skii shtab was not
under the line management of the police, but responsible only to the Kom-
somol. This gave its members both a greater loyalty to the youth organi-
zation and a greater range of action, since they were not bound by Soviet
laws governing the actions of the militia. Belying Khrushchev’s mighty
rhetoric on the return of Soviet legality (zakonnost’) these youth patrols
acted without any sanction of the law. Herein lay its strength; but it was
also here that Khrushchev intensified old problems and created new ones.
At first glance, the mobilization of youth to ensure collective order was
very successful. The public naming-and-shaming campaign provoked mass
 The arrival of spring? 147
61
discussions. Both community spirit and public order improved. The addi-
tional success of the campaign in improving the attractiveness of the Kom-
somol is demonstrated by the memoirs of Valerii Ronkin, later a member
of the dissident underground organization ‘The bell’ (Kolokol) in
Leningrad. Highly ideologically literate and already in trouble for some
over-frank remarks in Komsomol assemblies, Ronkin found a valve for his
desire ‘to return to the Komsomol its true face’62 in the reidbrigady at his
university. Directing their main efforts towards combating drunkenness
and lewd behaviour, they also enthusiastically tackled morals, stiliagi and
bureaucratization.63
Yet Ronkin’s memoirs also indicate the difficulties that were embedded
in the patrols’ success. He describes the escalating violence that ensued
between the brigades and so-called hooligans. A Moscow student-brigadier
was killed by a hooligan – only to become an instantaneous icon to the
movement. Ronkin himself had his nose broken during a raid and, with a
mixture of horror and fascination, he recounted the first time he hit some-
body directly in the face.64 Indeed, the situation on the street degenerated
so quickly that already in 1956 doubts were voiced at an all-Ukrainian
meeting of patrol members as to whether the example of Leningrad was
worthy of copying in the future; one speaker complained that, ‘instead of a
twin-pronged method of convincing and forcing, only one method is
employed: a blow to the head’.65 From another university it was reported
that ‘wild instincts had appeared among the student-brigades leading to a
purely sportive understanding of brawls and fights’.66 Complaints started to
come in from citizens about the brigades, rather than the hooligans, and in
some instances police arrested the ‘activists’ rather than their ‘victims’.67
Rough methods were employed not only against hooligans, but, also
against other non-conformist elements, namely drunks, loiterers and
stiliagi, who, as the raiders proudly declared, were outside the jurisdiction
of the police, but within the educative and punitive reach of the patrols.68 In
addition to the usual naming-and-shaming-campaign, measures such as
dunking drunks into water, cutting stiliaga-ties and shaving off unsuitable
hair from both boys and girls were common.69 Female patrol members
often taunted girls – often the consorts of stiliagi – who, in their opinion,
were dressed too loosely or behaved in a sexually provocative way.70
Ronkin explains in his memoirs why it was the stiliagi in particular that
became such a target for the raiders: ‘Against our high ideals they placed
tight trousers and shrill ties. Their derogative term for us was kolhoznik
(collective farmer) . . . in our view, exaggerated care of one’s exterior did
not correspond to intellect’.71 Rather than integrating the fashion-
conscious youth of those years back into the Komsomol fold, the patrols
widened the gap between official and unofficial youth cultures, setting up
and deepening existing divisions.
Yet at the same time, members of the patrols were usually not content
with official Soviet life either. The brigades’ strong sense of community
148 Juliane Fürst
could easily be turned against non-sanctioned targets such as the Komso-
mol leadership, the university or other official institution – after all, the
patrols understood themselves to be charged with fighting non-socialist
elements wherever they found them. Ronkin’s brigade revolted against
their obsequious leader, favoured abstract art despite contrary guidelines
from the Komsomol and finally tried to bring the institute’s organization
into their hands.72 To all intents and purposes, the brigade had thus
become what Party and Komsomol had tried to avoid: an alternative
organization with its own culture and ideological outlook. Ultimately, it
was participation in the brigade which allowed both critical thought and
oppositional activity to flourish.
Khrushchev’s most extensive solution to the ‘youth problem’ was an
attempt to channel young peoples’ energies into production. Alongside the
major recruitment programmes for the Virgin Lands and the Donbass,
young people were called upon to help at large construction sites, gather
in the harvest and build their own dormitories and clubs. While undoubt-
edly eliciting an enormous response initially, the problems prevailing at
the work-front soon undermined youth’s belief that they were repeating
the successes of the First Five-Year-Plan. Moreover, the emphasis the
regime put on work-campaigns after 1956 in order to counter demands for
democratization left many who had hoped in 1956 for radical change
rather cynical about their purpose.73 Telling is the experience of a young,
enthusiastic librarian in Leningrad, who had observed several readers’
conferences on Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone in Leningrad.
Impressed by the quality and radicalism of debate and dismayed by the
authorities’ attempts to stifle it, she complained to the Central Committee.
She was promptly cited to Moscow where an official explained her errors
to her, saying, ‘We cannot permit certain elements to spoil our youth’.
Upon hearing her reply, ‘But this is important for the development of
democracy’, the official countered, ‘What is important now is the question
of housing, the development of industry and a good harvest’.74 For young
idealists, committed to building socialism, it was difficult to argue with the
necessity of economic need. Yet in the end, the renewed concentration on
useful practicalities, which is evident in several resolutions and circulations
by the Komsomol in late 1956 and early 1957, left their questions unan-
swered.75

Conclusion: the arrival of spring?

Ultimately Khrushchev was left with the same problems which he had set
out to eradicate – if anything, on a much larger scale. Youth policy was
caught between the contradictory demands of generating enthusiasm and
spontaneity and maintaining control and ideological purity. Unable either
to fulfil the demands of radical youth calling for a return to revolutionary
times or to incorporate fashionable non-conformists into the official youth
 The arrival of spring? 149
culture, youth functionaries resorted once again to empty rhetoric and
bland solutions. Komsomol secretary Mesiatsev – responsible for propa-
ganda – recalls the challenges the organization faced in 1956 and how he,
in his capacity as head of a commission charged with improving the work
of the Komsomol, drew up a list of proposals. However, the list was a
rather sorry compilation of vague and inconsequential measures (most of
which were not implemented): establishment of subsidiaries such as a
youth group for tourism, lovers of photography etc; foundation of new
youth publications; strengthening of primary organizations and – a
favourite of Stalinist times – exchange of Komsomol tickets.76 Serious revi-
sions of policy were not proposed, much less implemented.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the youth problem was not solved. Youth
continued to find alternative platforms of collective experience, pursue
interests different to those receiving ideological sanction, and to deplore
the bureaucratic, out-of-touch Komsomol. If anything, the policies intro-
duced hardened the fronts between official and unofficial youth cultures.
The persecution of stiliagi and other non-conformist youth by young
people themselves – in the form of the different brigades – pushed young-
sters into choosing sides, whereas, hitherto, benevolent ambiguity had pre-
vented polarization. The partial surrender to certain non-ideological
pleasure-seeking pursuits disappointed the more radical youth constituent.
The introduction of large-scale eye-catching campaigns only provided
micro-worlds in which these identity conflicts were enacted.
Looking at Khrushchev-era campaigns to solve the ‘youth problem’ it
would be hard to speak of liberalization. Young individuals of
Khrushchev’s early years were not only subjected to the traditional pres-
sure of applying for Komsomol membership and keeping their behaviour
within the socialist framework, they were scrutinized for ideological faults
even in their most intimate spheres of life and expected to eradicate them
actively in themselves and others. In essence, these expectations did not
differ from the demands made of young people in Stalinist times. Then
too, the aim had been to build a new society by raising a new man or
woman. Then too, young people were called upon not only to behave in a
socialist way, but also to think, feel and dress in ways considered appropri-
ate for a youngster raised in the Soviet Union.
What was different about Khrushchev’s approach was that he actually
took steps to implement these demands in a very hands-on fashion.
Khrushchev-era youth policy sanctioned quasi-illegal measures aimed at
imposing a socialist conformism that went far beyond anything attempted
in the area of youth policy under Stalin. It combined propaganda with
physical force, not refraining from sponsoring state-imposed violence
against youngsters who dared to defy these norms. It claimed control over
every area of life and put a network of agents in place charged with report-
ing and dealing with everyday deviations. While thus distancing itself
from the Manichean worldview of the Stalinist purges, Khrushchev’s youth
150 Juliane Fürst
politics carried the socialist struggle into a more ordinary and personal
setting. Not the Gulag and social exclusion, but public humiliation and
forceful re-education were the preferred punishments. Khrushchev’s youth
policy was highly visible – as Komsomol patrols, as satirical newspapers
and as trainloads of youngsters shipped off to work in God-forsaken
places. It intruded into ordinary youngsters’ daily lives on a recurrent basis
by influencing youth’s decision in its choice of dress, style of dancing, dis-
plays of love and affection and leisure pursuits.
How, therefore, can one adequately describe the transition between
Stalinist and Khrushchev-era youth culture and policy? The traditional
terms of ‘Thaw’, reform and liberalization have proven inadequate. Even
the simple term ‘change’ panders more to Khrushchev’s self-representation
than it does justice to actual events. Neither the problems encountered nor
the essence of youth policies employed demonstrate qualitative change.
Rather, Khrushchev revived many Stalinist ideas on youth policy (rather
than returning to the progressive educational ideas of the early 1920s) and
relaunched them in campaigns that combined the practical with the ideo-
logical. It was thus the degree of intensity that distinguished Khrushchev-
era policies from those of the Stalin years. However, as has become
apparent, it was precisely Khrushchev’s intensification of Stalinist ideas
and campaigns that augmented the actual problems prevailing among
Soviet youth or turned them into such. To apply Zygmunt Bauman’s gar-
dening state analogy to the Soviet Union77 – Khrushchev was in many
ways a much more enthusiastic ideological gardener than his predecessor
had been after the war. Nonetheless, he also created much more mud and
dirt.

Notes
1 See A. Kassof ‘Youth organizations and the Adjustment of Soviet Adoles-
cents’, in Cyrill Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of
Social Change since 1861, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960;
M. Fainsod, ‘What Russian Students Think’, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1957, 31–6;
D. Burg, ‘Oppositionelle Stimmungen in der Akademischen Jugend der Sowe-
jetunion’, Osteuropa, vol. 7, 1957, 623–9; R. Delaney, ‘Youth versus the
Kremlin’, Sign, 1958, 40. This view was also prevalent among the Russian
m
é igrécommunity: see V. Zavalishin, ‘Osvobozhdenie ot strakha’, in Sud’bi
Rossii: Sbornik Statei, New York, 1957, pp. 148–56; The Revolt of Communist
Youth, Munich, 1957.
2 K. Mehnert, ‘Changing Attitudes of Russian Youth’, in Black (ed.), The Trans-
formation of Russian Society, 1960, p. 515.
3 I borrow the term ‘youth problem’ from K. Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media and the
Remaking of Soviet Culture 1950s–1960s’, PhD diss., Princeton University,
2003, pp. 46–98. This view was particularly prevalent among contemporary
Western observers and Russian m é igré
s (see n. 1), but continues to be a
favourite model of interpretation today, e.g. E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i
reformy, Moscow: Rossiia Molodaia, 1993.
4 This list omits youth engaged in religious practices, which was not considered a
 The arrival of spring? 151
‘youth problem’ as such, even though youth’s participation in religious prac-
tices worried officials.
5 GARF, R-8131/29/506/135.
6 TsDAHOU, 7/13/110/21.
7 Ibid.
8 In 1952, 98.4 per cent of all hooligan acts in Moscow were committed in public.
GARF, R-8131/32/453/87.
9 E.g. GARF, R-8131/32/453/32, 34, 44, 57.
10 RGANI, 5/15/432/174-176.
11 TsDAHOU, 7/13/109/30.
12 TsDAHOU, 7/13/495/71.
13 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4089/79.
14 J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg,
1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
15 The fact that even Komsomol members protected hooligans was much decried.
See TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/238.
16 Theft, rape and hooliganism were the crimes on the rise from 1954 onwards.
While the amnesty was blamed by many officials, the list of hotspots of hooli-
ganism reveals a strong correlation between concentration of industrial centres
and high incident rates. GARF, R-8131/32/4035/1-7.
17 M. Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of
the Stiliagi, 1945–53’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 50, 2002, 41.
E. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe obschetsvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, Moscow:
Rosspen, 1999, p. 153.
18 See J. Fü rst, ‘Stalin’s last Generation: Youth, State and Komsomol 1945–53’,
PhD Diss., University of London, 2003, pp. 223–58.
19 RGASPI, M-1/46/175/91-92.
20 M. Menshikov, ‘Zolotaia koronkoa’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 18 May 1946, 3.
S. Gorbusov, ‘Vecher v Gigante’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 16 April 1946, 2.
21 See for example Otchetnyi doklad at the 11th Congress VLKSM 1954, pub-
lished in Tovarishch Komsomol, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1969, pp. 130–1;
RGASPI M-1/2/348/65-70; RGASPI, M-1/32/816 (entire).
22 N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’, in
Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, p. 274.
23 RGASPI, M-1/46/192/146.
24 TsAODM, 3/63/56/366-388.
25 Membership remained stable during the war years, but rocketed afterwards,
thanks largely to school recruitment drives in the years 1948–54.
26 TsDAHOU, 1/24/492/6-7.
27 See for example RGASPI, M-1/46/192/145, 153, 185, RGASPI, M-1/32/821/79.
28 V. Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, St. Petersburg: Memorial, 1998, pp. 45–52.
29 See J. Fü rst, ‘Prisoners of the Soviet Self? Political Youth Opposition in Late
Stalinism’, Europe-Asia-Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2002, 353–75.
30 Archive Memorial Moscow, Files Krasnopevets, Cheshkovyi, Kosovyi. See also
Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, p. 100.
31 L. Silina, Nastroenie sovetskogo studenchestva 1945–64gg, Moscow: Russkii
Mir, 2004, pp. 145–58.
32 Fürst, ‘Prisoners’, p. 355; Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, pp. 45–7.
33 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4274/39-43, RGASPI, M-1/46/192/185, 236.
34 RGASPI, M-1/46/192/85.
35 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4492/9.
36 See A. Shelepin, Ob uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty komsomol’skikh
152 Juliane Fürst
organizatsii sredi molodezhi, Doklad na 7-plenume TsK VLKSM, 26.2.1957,
Moscow, 1957.
37 While this slogan rose to prominence after Stalin’s death, it was coined by the
writer Anton Chekhov and made famous among Soviet youth by the Stalinist
heroine Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, who copied these words into her diary.
38 RGASPI, M-1/3/840/11.
39 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239.
40 On straight talking and Virgin Lands see W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man
and his Era, London: Simon and Schuster, 2003, pp. 261, 263. C.f. M. Dobson,
‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation
1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University of London, 2003.
41 The biuro and secretariat in Kiev discussed 14 such items in 1951, while in the
same period the word hooliganism appears only once in the topics discussed at
the biuro and secretariat in Moscow. TsDAHOU, 7/13/109/1-3, RGASPI, M-
1/3, perechen’ for 1951.
42 ‘Po povodu bezdel’nikov i vechnykh studentov, Stalinskoe plemia, 8 May 1952,
3; TsDAHOU,7/13/106/63-68.
43 ‘V cheloveke vse dolzhno byt’ prekrasnym’, Stalinskoe plemia, 14 February
1953, 2.
44 ‘Kogda sem’ia teriaet rebenka . . .’, Stalinskoe plemia, 29 November 1953, 3.
45 ‘V poiskakh romantiki’, Stalinskoe plemia, 30 December 1953, 3.
46 ‘Eshche raz o pleseni’, Komsomol’skaia Pravda, 15 August 1956, 2; ‘Stiliagi’,
Sovetskaia kul’tura, 18 January 1955. See also Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, p. 47.
47 D. Beliaev, ‘Stiliaga’, Krokodil’, no. 7, 10 March 1949, 10.
48 Typical of a Stalinist treatment of hooliganism is the Komsomol’skaia pravda
article ‘Khuligan nakazan po zaslugam’, KP, 21 September 1952, 3. The hooli-
gan in question was a wayward, violent husband; the hooligan got his deserved
punishment: 18 months imprisonment.
49 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239.
50 ‘Kto iz nikh stiliaga?’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 11 August 1965, 3.
51 V. Beskaravainyi, ‘Oshibka’, Stalinskoe plemia, 17 October 1956, 3.
52 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1660/54-55.
53 For a similar argument see Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 96–9.
54 ‘Ostrym perom satiry’, Stalinskoe plemia, 7 February 1953, 3.
55 V. Nikolaev, Legkaia kavaleriia, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1958, pp. 3–6.
56 Late Stalinism had the institutions of komsomol’skii kontrol’ (Komsomol
control posts to check production processes) and Ionkery (young newspaper
correspondents writing in with reports on mismanagement or corruption).
57 Khrushchev had vented his views on how to treat hooligans at a joint
Party/Komsomol meeting in Leningrad, where he deplored the shyness with
which the Komsomol tackled hooligan behaviour and alleged that hooligans
were often braver than those designed to fight them. His speech initiated the
first raid on Nevskii prospekt. RGASPI, M-1/5/596/86-87.
58 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/13.
59 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70.
60 This was a formation that had existed already under Stalin. Its original purpose
was to help the police in the collection and processing of homeless and
vagabond children.
61 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/13.
62 Valerii Ronkin, Na smenu dekabriam prikhodit ianvari . . ., Moscow: Memorial,
2003, 121.
63 Ibid., pp. 69–74.
64 Ibid., pp. 78–9.
65 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70.
 The arrival of spring? 153
66 RGASPI, M-1/46/198/182.
67 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/22-24.
68 RGASPI, M-1/5/596/89.
69 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/8, 23; Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 73–4.
70 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/61.
71 Ronkin, Na smenu, p. 73.
72 Ronkin, Na smenu, pp. 81, 117, 120.
73 Shelepin strongly implied in his speech at the 7th Plenum VLKSM in 1957 that
‘work’ represented the right form of ‘fighting for communism’, mentioning con-
struction of housing, harvesting and general agricultural work: Shelepin, Ob
uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty, pp. 13–15.
74 RGALI, 1702/6/243/38-39.
75 RGASPI, M-1/46/192/90; ‘O rabote komsomol’skikh organizatsii v sviazi s
obrashcheniem tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS i soveta ministrov SSSR ko vsem
komsomol’skim organisatsiiam’, Postanovlenie TsK VLKSM: ‘Ob uluchshenii
ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty komsomol’skikh organizatsii sredi komsomol’tsev i
molodezhi’, Postanovlenie plenuma TsK VLKSM, February 1957 (published in
Tovarishch Komsomol, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1969).
76 N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’,
Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow, Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, pp. 274–86.
77 For an application of Bauman to the Soviet Union see A. Weiner, Making
Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 21–39.
8 From mobilized to free labour
De-Stalinization and the changing
legal status of workers
Donald Filtzer

Introduction: the dilemma of workplace reform

The question of how Soviet workers perceived, and responded to,
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, has yet to be adequately researched. We
know that the dictator’s death lowered the threshold at which popular
anger could erupt into violence against local officials and police, or against
perceived outsiders. In Novocherkassk, in 1962, discontent with food price
rises led to a full-fledged workers’ revolt which the Khrushchev leadership
brutally suppressed.1 Yet such events, though revealing and dramatic,
never involved more than a small proportion of workers, and then only at
climactic moments. How de-Stalinization affected the vast majority of
workers and their families at a more quiet, day-to-day level, is another
matter. Historiography still awaits a thorough study of how workers
understood and articulated their own position within society at large and
within the workplace, as subjects of the production process.
The present article does not pretend to fill this gap. It deals instead with
another, equally vital aspect of the history of this period, namely how the
legal status of workers changed after Stalin’s death and how this impacted
upon what we can loosely term the class relations of the Soviet system, in
particular the process of surplus extraction. By this I mean the system of
social, political and economic relations through which the Soviet elite
appropriated, and then attempted to dispose over, the surplus product
which its workers and peasants created. For in the last analysis it was this
process of surplus extraction which created the basis of the elite’s privi-
leges and, more deeply, determined its ability, however attenuated or
imperfect, to exercise its dominance over society.
As historians have long noted, insofar as Khrushchev wished genuinely
to reform the Soviet system, such reforms were constrained by a need to
preserve the system’s basic structures and foundations. There was a
permanent tension between the perception that change was desperately
needed, and a fear that reforms could bring the entire system crashing
down, together with Khrushchev and the rest of the elite. This same prin-
ciple applies to labour policy. Stalin had bequeathed to his successors an
 From mobilized to free labour 155
economy that was largely dysfunctional, and one of the prime causes of
this dysfunction was the way in which society’s toilers – its workers and
peasants – related to their work. Motivation was low and the quality of the
work they performed was retarding economic growth. Khrushchev under-
stood this, but the problem was how to improve motivation and productiv-
ity without threatening the class relations of the system.
Key to this dilemma was the labour process which had emerged out of
Stalinist industrialization. Stalinist industrialization was not an economic
process, but a process through which a uniquely Soviet system of produc-
tion relations, and indeed class relations, took shape. The regime and its
working class confronted each other in an antagonistic, conflict-ridden
relationship, a conflict which the regime resolved by destroying the
working class as a class, breaking down its social and class cohesion, atom-
izing it politically, and individualizing workers’ relationship to the process
of production. This had a contradictory effect. Politically it was essential to
the elite’s attempt to consolidate its power over society, because it closed
off to workers avenues of collective political action. In doing this,
however, it left individual action within the workplace as virtually the only
sphere within which workers could attempt to defend themselves from the
intense pressures of accumulation and loss of political freedom. The exter-
nal manifestations of this during the 1930s were poor labour discipline,
high levels of labour turnover, truly massive losses of work time, and large
amounts of low-quality output and outright waste. Attempts to suppress
these essentially individualized forms of non-cooperation were under-
mined by an intricate system of informal bargaining between workers and
line managers, as the latter found themselves compelled by acute labour
shortages to reach accommodation with workers over issues of discipline
and pay. In the context of the 1930s such concessions were primarily
negative, that is, managers colluded to lessen the potentially calamitous
impact on workers of punitive sanctions against violations of discipline and
job-changing, and of a wages policy that was little more than naked
speedup. Line managers had little choice but to enter into such tacit
arrangements. Had they not done so they would have had little chance of
meeting the regime’s demands for plan over-fulfilment and rapid increases
in output.
This was not a political or economic environment conducive to stable
economic growth. On the contrary, the highly authoritarian and bureau-
cratic ‘planning’ through which the elite attempted to administer industri-
alization generated almost endless chaos and disruptions to production.
Workers directly contributed to these dislocations by quitting their jobs
and by adopting a negligent approach to their work. The result was that a
large amount of the inputs and labour power expended on production
yielded no useful economic result or benefit. There was a very real expan-
sion of the industrial base and an equally real growth of gross output, but
much of this production was either literally wasted or could not be used
156 Donald Filtzer
for the purposes for which it was intended. What Stalinism had created
was a specifically Soviet labour process which partially negated the elite’s
attempts to maximize surplus production and to dispose of the surplus in
the ways it would have wished.
During the 1930s the full impact of this process was partially muted by
the growing use of coercion and the regime’s heavy reliance on the slave
labour sector. During the war and early post-war years these tendencies
were even more strongly suppressed, if not masked altogether. Wartime
legislation effectively ended workers’ freedom to change jobs, and this,
combined with the intense material hardships of the war period and the
eruption of a second, though less serious food crisis from late 1946 through
to the end of 1948, caused a fundamental shift in the balance of power on
the shop floor. Workers had fewer – in most cases, almost no – weapons
with which to extract concessions from line managers; line managers had
less need to grant such concessions and far fewer concessions to grant even
if they had been willing. This is not to say that informal bargaining com-
pletely disappeared, because management’s reliance on cooperation from
its workers stemmed only partly from the need to deter quitting. They also
required workers’ cooperation to iron out, rectify and otherwise cope with
the myriad delays, disruptions and dislocations to production, all of which
threatened plan fulfilment and with it managers’ careers and well-being.
Yet even here managers seem to have been less dependent on workers,
whose bargaining power during the war and early post-war years was
probably weaker than at any time since the First Five-Year Plan or in all
the years following Stalin’s death.2
Khrushchev’s labour policies altered this situation in quite fundamental
ways. First, he removed the legal restrictions on workers’ freedom of
movement. In this sense he returned the Soviet factory to the situation of
the 1930s. However, he went much further than this, because he also
removed most of the coercive levers through which the Stalinist regime
had attempted to curb slack discipline and enforce higher productivity and
tried to replace them with more informal mechanisms. To this extent even
the more general political reforms of de-Stalinization had an economic
motivation, insofar as they sought to give the regime renewed legitimacy
in the eyes of its workforce. There were also campaigns designed specifi-
cally to mobilize workers’ enthusiasm. Insofar as coercion was used, it was
primarily economic, namely an attempt to exercise tighter control over the
wages system. Yet even here there was a fundamental difference with the
Stalin period. Under Stalin wages policy had always tried to present
workers with a stark choice: either boost productivity or face poverty or
even starvation. Under Khrushchev the aim was different: to remove the
disincentives to exerting greater effort, but within the context of a larger
endeavour to raise the standard of living.
De-Stalinization, by substantially removing direct coercion within the
factory and more or less liquidating the slave labour sector, also did away
 From mobilized to free labour 157
with the constraints which, under Stalin, had kept the inherent centrifugal
tendencies within the Soviet labour process from developing unfettered
and unchecked. Khrushchev had hoped that the combination of political
and social reform and a shift from political-legal to economic coercion
would keep these tendencies under control, if not eliminate them. The
reality turned out to be the reverse: the elite found itself deprived of any
effective means of influencing worker behaviour within production or the
associated patterns of informal bargaining between workers and line man-
agers. At the same time, by continuing to close off avenues of collective
action and the right to form free working class organizations, Khrushchev
made informal bargaining the only arena within which workers could exer-
cise control over this vital part of their lives. Rather than providing reform
of the labour process and a stimulus to accumulation and economic
growth, de-Stalinization gave free play to a system of work relations within
the enterprise which tended to negate the accumulation process, culminat-
ing eventually in stagnation and collapse.

The liberalization of labour law and its consequences

During the period of the first three five-year plans, from 1928 to 1940, the
economy was characterized by two separate sources of labour power: a
growing slave labour sector, mobilized via the network of labour camps
and special settlements (the Gulag), and a free labour force. This notion of
‘free’ labour has to be qualified, because, as already indicated, the period
after 1928 saw workers subjected to ever-tighter political restrictions on
their freedom to organize, protest and collectively defend their position
within the workplace, not to mention within society at large. However,
workers remained ‘free’ in one fundamental respect: they could move
from one enterprise to another, and could use their relative scarcity to
lever various concessions regarding pay and discipline from local manage-
ments. It was this fact which shaped the specifically Soviet patterns of
shop-floor informal bargaining described above. It is true that the regime
tried to counter this process by imposing potentially serious economic
sanctions against absenteeism, but it is noteworthy that it made no similar
interventions to curb labour turnover.3 This came only in June 1940, when
the regime made both absenteeism and unauthorized quitting criminal
offences.4
With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the legal and de facto
status of Soviet workers changed dramatically. All workers were subjected
to compulsory mobilization. Workers in defence-related industries and in
transport were placed under military discipline, so that quitting one’s job
without permission now incurred not a relatively mild stint of two to four
months in a local jail, but from five to eight years in a labour camp for
those in industry and construction, and from three to ten years if they
worked in transport. Workers’ freedom of manoeuvre within the factories
158 Donald Filtzer
equally deteriorated. Working hours were lengthened, and internal discip-
line was enforced more tightly than at any time since the Civil War. The
war ended, of course, in 1945, but most of these controls remained in place
until the spring of 1948, when all cases of illegal job-changing once again
came under the June 1940 Edict.5
The ban on job-changing and harsh punishments for absenteeism were
just one means of controlling the mobility of labour power. From 1940
until Stalin’s death, the economy relied heavily on compulsory and semi-
compulsory labour mobilization. The ‘bifurcated’ labour force of the pre-
war period – ‘free’ and slave (or prison) labour – was now augmented by
various categories of semi-free workers, the status of most of whom was
for all intents and purposes that of indentured labourers. Some, such as
repatriated former prisoners of war, certain categories of internal exile, or
camp prisoners given conditional early release, were under the administra-
tive control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and were an
adjunct of the Gulag. Others were workers mobilized or conscripted
through the Ministry of Labour Reserves. Most of these latter came from
two sources. The first was teenagers recruited, but in most cases involun-
tarily conscripted, to the Ministry’s network of vocational training schools,
from which, after various periods of instruction, they were despatched to
enterprises in industry, coal mining or construction to serve a four-year
period of indenture. The other was workers recruited via so-called organ-
ized recruitment, or orgnabor, to sign fixed-term contracts to work in
industry or construction, often in seasonal industries such as peat-digging
or building materials. Although the orgnabor recruits notionally enlisted
of their own free will, the anti-quitting laws effectively bound them to
their contracts for their full duration, irrespective of the conditions they
encountered or the deceptions committed by recruiting agents. Taking the
Labour Reserve schools and orgnabor together, I have estimated that they
provided the economy with between 8 and 9 million new workers between
1946 and 1952 – more than the entire net increase in the manual workforce
in industry and construction over the same period.6 If we add to this
number the roughly three million Gulag prisoners in industry and trans-
port – nearly a quarter the size of the ‘free’ labour force in these two
sectors in 1947 – and the nearly 1 million former soldiers and civilians
repatriated from the Third Reich and working in MVD-controlled ‘special
contingents’ and labour battalions, we can appreciate just how dependent
the post-war reconstruction was upon a workforce labouring under greater
or lesser degrees of coercion.7
The problems caused by such heavy reliance on conscript labour were
obvious even during Stalin’s lifetime. A surprisingly large proportion of
indentured workers were willing to risk defying the law – and the threat of
the Gulag – by running away from their training schools and jobs, and
illegal turnover among young workers stayed high even when, after 1948,
it declined to very low levels for the workforce as a whole. Moreover, the
 From mobilized to free labour 159
quality of the training offered at the Labour Reserve schools was unreli-
able, and enterprises frequently had to retrain the graduates from scratch.8
The economy had already begun to reduce its reliance on indentured –
but significantly not prison – labour even before Stalin died, and
Khrushchev effectively put an end to both institutions. There were three
aspects to this policy: the mass release of camp prisoners, begun under
Beria but completed by Khrushchev; the end of labour conscription and
compulsory labour mobilization; the decriminalization of job-changing in
April 1956.9 Taken together these moves had a radical effect on the
economy. For the first time since forced dekulakization, Soviet industry
and construction had to rely solely on free labour power; and for the first
time since June 1940, they could not rely on the courts to deter workers
from quitting.
How enterprises coped with the loss of prison labour and special contin-
gents leased to them by the MVD (a totally separate category from prison-
ers working in the camps themselves) is a question which awaits further
archival study. I do not know how many such workers there were in 1953,
although as late as 1949 industries such as coal mining and oil drilling and
refining were still heavily dependent on them.10 We should not forget that
the coal mining region of Vorkuta had been exclusively run by the MVD,
and many of the ex-prisoners remained there after 1953 to join the free
labour force.
The fate of labour conscription and the Labour Reserve system is some-
thing we know rather more about. The system had been introduced in
October 1940, and had called for an annual draft from the collective farms
of two teenage males for every 100 working-age kolkhoz members of both
genders.11 Once war broke out, the system was expanded to include both
boys and girls. The schools were of two types: short training courses in
Factory Training Schools (shkoly fabrichno-zavodskogo obucheniya, or
FZO) for so-called ‘mass trades’ in coal mining, construction and heavy
industry; and more prestigious trade or craft schools, which offered two-
year training in skilled manual trades for heavy industry (remeslennye
uchilishcha, or RU) and the railways (zheleznodorozhnye uchilishcha, or
ZhU). As indicated, this system not only stayed in place after the war, but
was a major source of replenishing the labour force. The FZO relied
largely on conscription; the RU, which offered far better conditions, had
greater success attracting volunteers.
The economy’s reliance on the Labour Reserve schools and labour con-
scription had been steadily declining even before Khrushchev. The largest
intake was in 1947, when the FZO took in over 830,000 students (73 per
cent of them conscripts), and the RU/ZhU another 250,000 (of whom 80
per cent were volunteers). By 1952 the system had shrunk to barely a third
this size, and the FZO to less than a quarter: the FZO enrolled 184,700
students (56 per cent of whom were still conscripts), and the RU/ZhU
145,500 (98 per cent of them volunteers).12 The reasons for this are not
160 Donald Filtzer
complicated. The main function of the FZO had been to direct young
workers into those sectors – primarily coal mining, metallurgy and con-
struction – where conditions were so harsh that they could not hope to
attract workers voluntarily. By 1948 these three branches alone were
absorbing over three-quarters of all FZO students.13 Yet by 1952 even
these sectors had seen a relative stabilization of their labour supplies:
although they still could not recruit without conscription, their demand for
new labour power was decreasing. At the same time the skills require-
ments of industry were changing, a fact already reflected in the increasing
proportion of Labour Reserve students going into the RU and ZhU.
The system was fundamentally reorganized soon after Stalin’s death. In
1954 the regime introduced a new tier of training, technical colleges
(tekhnicheskie uchilishcha), to provide skilled vocational training to
teenagers who had already completed a general secondary school. Gradu-
ates were still obliged to work for three years at the enterprises – now
including agricultural Machine Tractor Stations and state farms – to which
the Labour Reserves (now demoted from a ministry to a mere Chief
Administration) might assign them.14 In 1955 the RU and ZhU were offi-
cially made voluntary – a somewhat hollow gesture in view of the fact that
this was already de facto the case before Stalin died.15 In 1959 the FZO
were formally replaced by a new network of Professional-Technical
schools (professional’no-tekhnicheskoe obrazovanie, PTO).16 The changes
here were not just institutional. From 1954 roughly half of all labour
reserve graduates now went into agriculture as so-called ‘mechanizers’.
The numbers going into industry continued to fall.17
The decline of the Labour Reserve system was not, however, simply a
reflection of structural changes in the economy. At its heart lay much
deeper problems which had stronger continuity with the Stalin years. The
schools had never been overly effective from an educational point of view.
In the early post-war years the schools suffered from being housed in inap-
propriate, often dilapidated premises and from a dearth of machinery on
which to teach trainees. The curricula were badly designed and often out
of date. Many of the teachers were unqualified, of questionable compe-
tence, and abusive to the children. It is therefore not surprising that facto-
ries routinely complained that the graduates of the schools, even those
from the RU, were generally ill-prepared for the jobs for which they had
been taken on, and that enterprises had to retrain them more or less from
scratch.18 Perhaps surprisingly, these problems did not lessen as the post-
war economic recovery progressed. On the contrary, the disparity between
what the schools provided and the skills industry needed simply widened.
This was even true in coal mining, which as I have noted, was one of the
system’s primary raisons d’être. By 1956 pit managers were shutting down
their Labour Reserve schools because of the limited employability of the
graduates. The litany of shortcomings could have been written ten years
earlier: the schools trained students in trades the mines did not need; the
 From mobilized to free labour 161
curriculum showed little familiarity with the machinery and organization
of labour the mines were then applying; the teachers were ‘poorly chosen’.
Mine managers estimated that they had completely to retrain about half
the Labour Reserve graduates they took on. In any event, they were
already training on-the-job five times as many workers as they were
receiving from the Labour Reserve schools, at about one-tenth the cost
per student.19 Yet the rundown of the Labour Reserve schools and the
shift to the PTO did not solve this problem. The new schools – now con-
trolled by regional sovnarkhozy – still failed to coordinate the number of
trainees with the needs of enterprises, and enterprises were still refusing to
accept workers whom they could not employ.20
The fate of orgnabor was somewhat different. From 1947 through 1952,
orgnabor recruited approximately 600,000 to 650,000 workers a year. Of
these, roughly a quarter went into industrial and military construction; 15
to 20 per cent into the timber industry; between 12 and 16 per cent into
coal mining, and another 20 per cent into metallurgy, the oil industry and
electric power stations.21 In 1958 orgnabor still provided some 500,000
workers for these same industries, but by 1962 this had fallen to just
249,000.22 This apparent continuity with the late Stalin years concealed a
significant shift in its role. Under Khrushchev, orgnabor was used less and
less to recruit workers to existing enterprises, and more as a vehicle to
recruit workers to construction in newly developing regions.23 Like the
Labour Reserve system, orgnabor was better at providing in quantity than
it was in quality. Prior to the sovnarkhoz reform of 1957, plans for
numbers recruited for each region and industry had been drawn up by the
industrial Ministries, and coordination between the needs of enterprises or
construction sites and the number and skills of the workers they received
was haphazard at best. The sovnarkhoz reform should have corrected this,
since, at least in theory, the sovnarhkozy had proper knowledge of local
labour requirements and local labour resources – a fact which allegedly
helps explain the fall in numbers recruited. Yet problems persisted. The
system continued to despatch workers with the wrong skills – in the main,
sending skilled building workers to sites which could only employ them at
unskilled labouring jobs. Given the more liberal legal climate the response
was predictable. Some workers quit; others became embroiled in labour
disputes with management.24 In coal mining the problems were somewhat
different: recruiters made up their quotas by hiring miners who had been
fired from one mine for discipline violations and dispatching them to
another. To this extent allegedly unreliable workers were being recycled
back through the system.25
The essential point here is that structural changes to the economy, the
already receding utility of overt coercion in the mobilization and direction
of labour power, and the new political rules that came with de-Staliniza-
tion all meant that industry and construction had to rely on other methods
to meet their demands for labour power. Here we should differentiate
162 Donald Filtzer
between labour recruitment and retention in the USSR’s older industrial
centres, and Khrushchev’s grand plan for the industrialization of Siberia
and the Far East. The latter was an industrial equivalent to his Virgin
Lands campaign in agriculture, and relied heavily on the recruitment and
mobilization of new workers, primarily young people. In addition to
orgnabor, the core of this campaign was the Social Call-Up (obshchestven-
nyi prizyv), organized by the Komsomol in 1954, initially to help recruit
for the Virgin Lands, and then extended in 1956 to industry and construc-
tion.26 Its results were not insignificant: annual intake rose from 200,000 in
1956 to 590,000 in 1958, and a further 800,000 over the period April 1958
to April 1962. Thus in numerical terms it was no less important than
orgnabor, and was instrumental in providing workers for certain key
industries: in 1956 it provided 40 per cent of all new workers going into
non-ferrous metallurgy and some two-thirds of new recruits for high-
priority construction projects (so-called ‘Shock Construction’).27 Like
orgnabor and the Virgin Lands campaigns, these results were partially nul-
lified by high rates of labour turnover – a response to the harsh, often
primitive housing and living conditions these young workers encoun-
tered.28 The difficulties encountered by the Social Call-Up were indicative
of a much larger phenomenon. The regime found it almost impossible to
create a permanent industrial workforce in Siberia and the Far East.
Between 1956 and 1960 some 1.5 million people migrated into Siberia
under one or another recruitment campaign, yet the region suffered a net
population loss: between 1959 and 1965, 360,000 more people left the
region than came in.29 Under Stalin such problems had been solved
through the Gulag and labour conscription. When these were removed the
regime found that it could attract people to the region, but could not force
them to stay. Only the creation of a viable infrastructure could have done
that, and this is precisely what it could not provide.
The repeal of the Stalinist labour laws also had a profound impact in
the industrial centres of the European USSR. In some ways workers’ reac-
tion to decriminalization was surprisingly muted. When Stalin removed
criminal penalties for absenteeism in July 1951, its incidence skyrocketed.
In industries such as coal mining, chemicals, non-ferrous metallurgy and
industrial construction it literally doubled or tripled.30 We might therefore
have expected a similar surge in labour turnover after April 1956, on the
theory that workers who had been tied to jobs they had wanted to leave
would now suddenly exercise the legal right to do so. The real level of
increases turned out to be more modest: from a national average of
around 12 per cent in 1954, turnover rose to just over 33 per cent in 1956,
then fell back to around 17 per cent in 1960, before rising back to its 1956
level during 1963 and 1965. Put another way, this means that the average
worker changed jobs but once in eight years in 1954, and once every three
years in 1956, 1963 and 1965. Such figures are hardly exceptional if com-
pared with the rate at which workers had been changing jobs just before
 From mobilized to free labour 163
the 1940 criminalization – roughly once every 12 to 15 months.31 Yet these
were national averages across all of industry and construction, and con-
cealed a genuine crisis situation which arose in specific sectors and locali-
ties, most notably in the engineering industry.
The story of labour turnover in engineering is of some significance,
because it shows just how far the relationship between workers and man-
agers in Soviet factories had become ‘normalized’. What prompted it was a
reform of the wages system which Khrushchev introduced between 1956
and 1962. The purpose of the reform had been to undermine an important
aspect of shop-floor informal bargaining, namely the propensity for line
managers to collude in various subterfuges of wage- and rate-setting regu-
lations in order to protect workers’ customary earnings. Under Stalin such
subterfuges had been a necessity, because the essence of Stalinist wages
policy had been regularly (usually annually) to push up individual piece-
work targets (known as ‘norms’) and to cut piece rates, so that workers
would need substantially to raise output merely to retain their previous
earnings. One of the more widely used methods of doing this was for man-
agers simply to retard the annual norm rises, so that the increases actually
implemented in a given shop or factory were well below those decreed by
the centre. Norms were deliberately kept at manageable levels, so that
workers could substantially over-fulfil them, earn large bonuses, and in
this way make up for the cuts in piece rates. The problem for the authori-
ties was twofold. First, it led to overspending of the wages fund. More
importantly, however, it blunted the coercive impact of the annual norm
rises, because workers could defend earnings without necessarily achieving
large increases in output and even without over-fulfilling the shop or
factory plan. In the mid-1950s, just before the reform was introduced, the
average pieceworker in Soviet industry fulfilled his or her norms by 170
per cent – that is, by 70 per cent more than the official target. The average
piece worker in engineering fulfilled his or her norms by 209 per cent –
more than double the target. If managers had not made this possible,
workers simply would not have earned enough money to survive.32
Just as under Stalin, the economic authorities under Khrushchev saw
such behaviour as a brake on productivity and economic growth. The wage
reform attempted to discourage it through a combination of incentives and
pressure. The incentive was to raise the share of the basic wage in total
earnings, so that workers would be less desperate to keep norms low. The
reform also sought to detach earnings from norm fulfilment per se and
make them dependent on more qualitative indicators, such as overall
enterprise plan fulfilment or the quality of output. Pressure, however,
played the dominant role. The reform attempted to regrade most piece
workers downwards into lower skill and wage grades, while at the
same time exerting tighter control on norm- and rate-setting, so that they
would more accurately reflect alleged improvements in technology and
work organization. There were many reasons why this strategy proved
164 Donald Filtzer
effectively unworkable, but significantly it did achieve some success in
engineering, where the nature of the production process made it possible
more tightly to control norms and earnings.33 But the ‘victory’ here was
pyrrhic. Machine-tool operators throughout the engineering industry
responded with their feet and left their jobs en masse.
The result was a massive shortage of machine-tool operators through-
out engineering. We can gauge the scale of the disruption from the fact
that in 1964, engineering plants in the 15 largest oblasti and territories of
the RSFSR alone reported a shortage of 600,000 workers. This was over
ten per cent of all workers in engineering factories outside of Ukraine, and
a much larger proportion of machine-tool operators. Thus the shortage of
workers in this key trade was substantial.34 Factories were losing up to a
third of their machine-tool operators, many of whom opted to take lower-
paying jobs in the same industry if these gave the workers greater control
over the speed of work or how they organized their job. Given the central
role of machinists within the production process of machine-building, and
the equally central role of machine-building within Soviet heavy industry
as a whole, the knock-on effects of their high turnover were considerable.
Most engineering factories did not have enough machinists to run two full
shifts; some could barely manage one. Bottlenecks, a constant problem in
Soviet factories anyway, grew worse, as assembly workers and fitters could
not obtain enough parts to maintain a steady flow of output. Moreover,
the crisis developed a self-perpetuating dynamic. As experienced machine-
tool operators quit their jobs, factories tried to plug the gap by taking on
inexperienced younger workers or ex-servicemen, or by shifting auxiliary
workers into production. Yet even where such efforts bore some fruit –
which was not very often – skilled machinists were quitting faster than the
new, less efficient recruits could replace them.35 In some cases it is clear
that quitting was even a de facto substitute for going on strike: workers,
aggrieved over what they perceived as inequities in the local wages system,
withdrew their labour by giving notice. More and more of their colleagues
followed suit until management perceived the danger and intervened to
meet their demands.36
A labour crisis of this magnitude would have been unthinkable prior to
1953, or even prior to 1956. Labour turnover re-emerged as a ‘weapon of
the weak’, a rational response by workers to unsatisfactory, if not intolera-
ble conditions and pay, and at the same time one of the few bargaining
chips they had in dealings with enterprise managers. The crisis was resolved
only under Brezhnev and Kosygin, who rescinded the Khrushchev wage
reform and removed controls on the upward drift of money wages.

Epilogue: the long-term problem of surplus extraction

The above discussion has focused on how the re-establishment of free
mobility of labour power undermined certain key objectives of economic
 From mobilized to free labour 165
policy under Khrushchev. Its ramifications, however, ranged far beyond
whether or not Siberia would be industrialized or whether the regime
would succeed in finding more effective incentive systems. They touched
the very condition of the Soviet elite’s continued existence, namely its
ability to regulate the process of surplus extraction. The industrialization
of Siberia was deemed crucial to the larger process of accumulation, and
to the extent that high labour turnover retarded or jeopardized this policy,
it threatened accumulation itself. The failure of Khrushchev’s wage reform
and the crisis in the engineering industry were perhaps even more damag-
ing from this point of view, because they signalled the resurrection of
informal shop-floor bargaining at the very core of Soviet industry.
Because of the nature of the Soviet political system, the reassertion of
workers’ ability to exploit their relative scarcity did not lead to large-scale
strikes or other forms of mass action. It eroded the Soviet system’s viabil-
ity in less obvious but no less important ways, already described in the
introduction: substantial losses of work time; resistance to technological
innovation; low-grade quality of finished output; and general problems of
labour discipline, including alcoholism. Not all of these problems stemmed
directly from workers’ own actions; rather they were part of a distinct
cycle of reproduction of shop-floor relations. The actions of workers in
one stage of the production and distribution process created ‘objective’
difficulties for workers further down the line: shortages of raw materials or
components, shoddy or unusable machine parts which had to be remade or
adapted, or faulty equipment which had to be constantly repaired, all
helped to create a work environment which workers found intensely frus-
trating, but which also gave them additional bargaining power with line
managers, who did not just worry that their workers would quit and move
to a new job, but relied on their cooperation to help circumnavigate or
rectify the endless stream of problems that were the daily reality of the
Soviet factory.
Not all workers had this kind of leverage in equal measure. Skilled
workers were in a more powerful position than the unskilled; workers in
large enterprises in priority sectors were better placed than those in small
or peripheral factories or in light industry; and perhaps most fundamental
of all, men were much stronger than women. To a large extent it was the
special position of women workers within Soviet industry which helped the
elite recoup some of its control over surplus extraction. Light industry,
which was overwhelmingly female, had a much higher intensity of labour,
better discipline and far less lost work time than heavy industry. Within
heavy industry itself women formed a reserve army of low-paid semi-
skilled workers, and were the bulk of those doing heavy, semi-skilled
manual work in foundries, warehousing and internal factory transport.
Even where they were in the same trades as men and worked on identical
jobs, they still earned significantly less. To the extent that this greater
exploitation of female labour power increased the amount of the surplus
166 Donald Filtzer
product and improved the elite’s ability to dispose of it as it wished, it par-
tially compensated for the elite’s inability to exercise similar control over
large sections of the male workforce. In this sense, male Soviet workers
derived quite palpable privileges from this ‘super-exploitation’ of their
wives, sisters and mothers – not to mention the privileges they enjoyed
within the home.37
After Khrushchev fell from power this reserve army of labour came to
include not just women, but also migrant workers of both sexes who
moved to the large industrial centres, such as Moscow and Leningrad,
from outlying regions on special work permits. These were the so-called
limitchiki, and their importance to the regulation of the Soviet economy
was critical, for, like migrant labour everywhere, they carried out jobs that
were economically indispensable but which the local population, especially
the local male population, refused to do. This, however, is another story.38
What is relevant here is that with de-Stalinization the Soviet system
needed to find, and to rely on, more indirect methods of exploiting labour
power. If the methods of the Stalin years had exhausted their political and
economic possibilities, those that replaced them brought with them new
contradictions. Although they allowed the system to expand and to survive
for several decades more, they eventually sapped it of any remaining
dynamic. In this sense, at least, the political economy of the Soviet labour
process proved to be the ultimate dilemma of de-Stalinization.

Notes
1 V. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin
Years, London & Armonk, New York, 2002. This is a slightly abridged version
of his Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953-
nachalo 1980-kh gg.), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999.
2 For a fuller argument of this point see J.E. Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction and
the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945–1953, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, and
D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the
Stalinist System After World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002, ch. 6.
3 Prior to June 1940, the emphasis had been on punishing absenteeism. From
November 1932 absenteeism for a single day required automatic dismissal from
the enterprise, loss of ration entitlements, and eviction from enterprise-owned
housing. When rationing ended in 1935 part of the law lost its force. Neverthe-
less, it continued to form the basis of regime policy in December 1938, when
absenteeism was redefined to include lateness of more than 20 minutes.
‘Decree of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commis-
sars of the USSR, 15 November 1932, Ob uvol’nenii za progul bez
uvazhitel’nykh prichin’, Trud, 16 November 1932; ‘Decree of Council of
People’s Commissars of the USSR, Central Committee of the All-Union Com-
munist Party (Bolsheviks), and the All-Union Central Council of Trade
Unions, 28 December 1938, O meropriiatiiakh po uporiadocheniiu trudovoi
distsipliny, uluchsheniiu praktiki gosudarstvennogo sotsial’nogo strakhovaniia i
bor’be s zlouportrebleniiami v etom dele’, Pravda, 29 December 1938.
4 ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 26 June 1940, O
 From mobilized to free labour 167
perekhode na vos’michasovoi rabochii den’, na semidnevnuiu rabochuiu
nedeliu i o zapreshchenii samovol’nogo ukhoda rabochikh i sluzhashchikh s
predpriiatii i uchrezhdenii’, Izvestiia, 27 June 1940. Truants were sentenced to
up to six months’ corrective labour at their enterprise with a loss of pay of up to
25 per cent. People quitting their jobs without permission served a prison sen-
tence of two to four months.
5 ‘Edicts of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 26 December
1941, Ob otvetstvennosti rabochikh i sluzhashchikh predpriiatii voennoi
promyshlennosti za samovol’nyi ukhod s predpriiatii’; 15 April 1943, O vve-
denii voennogo polozheniia na vsekh zheleznykh dorogakh; and 9 May 1943, O
vvedenii voennogo polozheniya na morskom i rechnom transporte’. The Edicts
were unpublished but are cited in a number of documents. The most accessible
public source is V.N. Zemskov, ‘Ukaz ot 26 iiuniia 1940 goda . . . (eshche odna
kruglaia data)’, Raduga, no. 6, 1990, 45–6. The penalties against absenteeism
did not change during the war, with the exception that truants had their bread
rations cut by between 100 and 200 grams a day – a potentially draconian stric-
ture at a time when rations were already below subsistence level. J. Barber and
M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic
History of the USSR in World War II, London: Longman, 1991, p. 173.
6 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 22–40.
7 The number of prison labourers is for 1947, and includes roughly one million
German and Japanese prisoners of war. It is calculated from GARF,
9401/2/199/73-4, 396, and d. 234, l. 8. The number of repatriates in special
contingents and labour battalions is calculated from R.W. Davies, Soviet
History in the Yeltsin Era, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 167–8, and
RGASPI, 17/121/545/14. Of these figures, at the end of 1947 the MVD was
renting out roughly 500,000 camp prisoners and 900,000 workers from special
contingents and labour battalions to enterprises and construction firms; several
hundred thousand more exiles were working outside of agriculture in local
enterprises.
8 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 120–32, 167–76.
9 Criminal prosecutions for illegal job-changing were already declining before
1953, but legal recognition of this fact came only after the Secret Speech. ‘Edict
of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 25 April 1956, Ob
otmene sudebnoi otvetstvennosti rabochikh i sluzhashchikh za samovol’nyi
ukhod s predpriiatii i iz uchrezhdenii i za progul bez uvazhitel’noi prichiny’,
Vedemosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, no. 10, 1956, art. 203.
10 In 1949 workers leased from the MVD accounted for 10 per cent of coal miners
and over 30 per cent of workers in the oil industry. GARF, 9401/2/269, tom 1, l.
63, and RGAE, 1562/321/416/40.
11 ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 2 October 1940, O
gosudarstvennykh trudovykh rezervakh SSSR’, Pravda, 3 October 1940.
12 GARF, 9507/2/418/1,3; d. 425, l. 8. See also, Filtzer, Soviet Labour and Late
Stalinism, pp. 36–9.
13 GARF, 9507/2/420/9.
14 ‘Decree of the USSR Council of Ministers, 2 August 1954, Ob organizatsii
proizvodstvenno-tekhnicheskoi podgotovki molodezhi, okonchivshei srednie
shkoly, dlia raboty na proizvodstve’, Direktivy KPSS i sovetskogo pravitel’stva
po khozyaistvennym voprosam, vol. iv, Moscow, 1958, pp. 247–50.
15 ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 18 March 1955, Ob
otmene prizyva (mobilizatsii) molodezhi v remeslennye i zheleznodorozhnye
uchilishcha’, Direktivy KPSS i sovetskogo pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym
voprosam, vol. iv, Moscow, 1958, p. 371.
16 Rabochii klass SSSR (1951–1965 g.g.), Moscow, 1969, pp. 112–14.
168 Donald Filtzer
17 S.L. Seniavskii, Rost rabochego klassa SSSR (1951–1965 g.g.), Moscow, 1966,
pp. 105–6.
18 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 131–2.
19 Promyshlenno-ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 7 April 1957.
20 Seniavskii, Rost rabochego klassa, pp. 107–8.
21 GARF, 9507/2/835/4; d. 842, l. 3, 25, 195; d. 855, l. 2–3; d. 863, l. 1–2.
22 Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 104–5.
23 Sotsialisticheskii trud, 1960, no. 4, 75–6. In 1959–60, some 57 per cent of all
workers resettling from the RSFSR into Siberia and the Far East – regions tar-
geted for new industrial development – went there via orgnabor. Sotsialistich-
eskii trud, no. 6, 1961, 22.
24 Sotsialisticheskii trud, no. 4, 1960, 74–8. The rise in disputes was partly caused
by inconsistencies in the labour law. The post-Stalin labour code stipulated that
workers had a right to be employed on jobs commensurate with their trade and
skill grade. The basic orgnabor contract, however, obliged the worker to carry
out whatever job management gave them, whether or not it matched their
training and skill levels. Ibid., p. 75.
25 Trud i zarabotnaia plata, no. 6, 1959, p. 30.
26 Izvestiia, 19 May 1956.
27 Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 108–9, 112. By 1958 almost all of these recruits went
to construction. Of the 590,000 mobilized in 1958, 300,000 went to building sites
in Siberia, and another 250,000 to projects in their own oblast’. The bulk of the
remainder – 40,000 – became underground workers in coal mining.
28 Stroitel’naia gazeta, 17 March 1957; Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 111–12.
29 Rabochii klass Sibiri, 1961–1980 g.g., Novosibirsk, 1986, pp. 90, 99. Voprosy
ekonomiki, no. 5, 1962, p. 50.
30 RGASPI,17/131/279/24; GARF, 8131/28/1152/11; RGAE, 8592/2/899/84-7, and
d. 915, l. 74.
31 The figures for 1939 are from Problemy ekonomiki, no. 6, 1939, p. 158, and
A.V. Mitrofanova, ‘Istochniki popolneniia i sostav rabochego klassa SSSR v
gody tretei piatiletki’, in Izmeneniia v chislennosti i sostave sovetskogo
rabochego klassa, Moscow, 1961, p. 216. Figures for the 1950s and 1960s are
from Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 10, 1963, 47–8, and Trud v SSSR, Moscow, 1988,
p. 258.
32 R.A. Batkaev and V.I. Markov, Differentsiatsiia zarabotnoi platy v promyshlen-
nosti v SSSR, Moscow, 1964, p. 198. For a more detailed account of the wages
system prior to Khrushchev see Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrial-
ization, ch. 8.
33 The reform ran into two main difficulties. Emphasis on plan fulfilment and
quality indicators still left workers’ earnings vulnerable to a plethora of disrup-
tions to production which were outside of workers’ direct control. For those
still on piece rates, there was considerable resistance to regrading. In both cases
managers still found themselves under pressure to intervene and prevent earn-
ings from dropping, and so manipulated the new criteria just as they had
manipulated the old norm-setting and bonus systems. See Filtzer, Soviet
Workers and de-Stalinization, ch. 4.
34 In 1965 Soviet engineering employed 7.5 million manual workers, 1.5 million of
whom were in Ukraine. Of this total there were 1.25 million machine-tool oper-
ators. Trud v SSSR. Statisticheskii sbornik, Moscow, 1968, pp. 84–5, 121, 206–7.
We do not know how many of the reported 600,000 vacancies were for machin-
ists, but we do know they made up a disproportionate share. E.A. Utkin,
Rabotu mashin – na polnuiu moshchnost’, Moscow, 1964, pp. 29–30.
35 See, for example, Leningradskaia pravda, 21 April, 14 May and 20 May 1961;
Ibid., 17 May, 3 July and 31 July 1962; 27 July, 24 August and 13 November
 From mobilized to free labour 169
1963. L.S. Bliakhman, A.G. Zdravomyslov, O.I. Shkaratan, Dvizhenie rabochei
sily na promyshlennykh predpriiatiiakh, Moscow, 1965, pp. 71–4. Moskovskaia
pravda, 29 January 1963; Ural’skii rabochii (Sverdlovsk), 16 November 1962;
Rabochii krai (Ivanovo), 19 September 1964.
36 For a particularly graphic example of this see the case of the Kotliakov factory
in Leningradskaia pravda, 11 October 1962.
37 I have developed this argument in some detail in Filtzer, Soviet Workers and
de-Stalinization, ch. 7.
38 For an analysis of the role of limitchiki in the motor vehicle industry see Sotsio-
logicheskie issledovaniia, no. 3, 1987, p. 80. For an especially heart-rending
account of migrant workers in textiles see Komsomol’skaia pravda, 1 May 1991.
Part III
Rewriting Stalinism
In search of a new style
9 Thaws and freezes in Soviet
historiography, 1953–64
Roger D. Markwick

We placed our hopes on Khrushchev, although we saw that he by no means

had a consistent outlook. On the one hand he tried to overcome some
things from the past; on the other, we saw that he was shaped by that very
same past. On the one hand, he said that Stalin was a ‘criminal’, on the
other, usually more vociferously, that he was a ‘great Marxist’. Khrushchev,
however, had no idea how to reconcile ‘Stalin the criminal’ with ‘Stalin the
great Marxist’.1

Nothing illustrates more vividly the ambivalent nature of Nikita

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization than the fate of Soviet historiography in his
time. Stalin’s death, and especially Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in
his Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress (1956), had emboldened pro-
fessional historians to critique historical writing. They did so within the
bounds of official Marxism–Leninism, but even this was too threatening
for Khrushchev and his circle. Fearful of unleashing the floodgates of
historical revisionism, initial attempts to revisit and reinvigorate Soviet
history were soon quashed by the party leadership. But the 20th Party
Congress had spurred a rethinking of historiography that had a momen-
tum of its own, which was to be given renewed, if short-lived, impetus by
the 22nd Party Congress. It would take the removal of Khrushchev himself
in October 1964 by the neo-Stalinists around Leonid Brezhnev to deliver a
decisive blow to historical revisionism. This chapter will examine historio-
graphical developments, chiefly among professional historians, and their
interaction with the political processes of the Khrushchev period.

The Thaw
Ever since Stalin’s menacing admonition in 1931 to the editorial board of
Proletarskaia revoliutsiia that historical scholarship should be nothing less
than ‘party scholarship’,2 party control over historiography, especially the
history of the party itself, had been at the core of Stalin’s ideological
system and the ‘cult of personality’ that surrounded him. Partiinost’ (party
spirit) meant that the leadership of the communist party should be the sole
174 Roger D. Markwick
arbiter of historical truth. Stalin’s subsequent ruthless imposition in 1938
of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks):
Short Course,3 established the paradigm for Soviet historical writing.
Accordingly, Soviet ‘historical science’ had been reduced to little more
than a ‘handmaiden’ to party policy.4
For historians schooled in the draconian Soviet academic system,
casting off the fetters of the Short Course paradigm was not simply a
matter of substituting historical truth for Stalinist falsehoods. According to
the revisionist historian Mikhail Gefter, it entailed a shift in ‘social con-
sciousness’, in the first place on the part of the intelligentsia, a ‘powerful
imperative’ for which was the ‘victory of the Soviet people in the Great
Patriotic War’, further fuelled by Stalin’s death, the execution of Beria, the
cessation of mass repression and a certain liberalization, which nourished
the first ‘shoots of de-politicization and de-ideologization’ of thought.5
But the Thaw in historical thinking was not initiated by the professional
historians, among the most cowed of the Soviet intelligentsia. Rather, in
the Russian tradition, writers and publicists registered the first shifts in
social consciousness, facilitated by Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s ‘thick journal’
Novyi mir, which in December 1953 boldly called for ‘Sincerity in Liter-
ature’.6 Literature became the vehicle for the appearance of a genuine
‘public opinion’ in Soviet life7 and the catalyst for the creative and scient-
ific intelligentsia as a whole, including historians, to confront the issue of
‘reflecting reality’ through ‘creative freedom’.8 Not for the last time under
Khrushchev, writers took the lead in addressing issues that professional
historians were loath to tackle.

Sanctioned freedom
The historians moved cautiously, awaiting their cue from party resolutions
and editorials in the Soviet Union’s leading historical journal, Voprosy
istorii [Problems of History]. Ironically the seeds for the de-Stalinization of
history had already been sown by the party leadership itself immediately
after Stalin’s death. On the 50th anniversary of the communist party’s
founding (1903–53), the need to rectify the ‘cult of personality’ and to
institute collective leadership were at the top of the party’s agenda. They
remained so right up until the 20th Party Congress, although as yet no con-
nection had been made between the ‘cult’ and Stalin.
One of the first steps taken by the party to reinvigorate historiography
was the appointment in May 1953, on the recommendation of the director
of the Institute of History, Arkady Sidorov, of a new editor-in-chief and
deputy editor to Voprosy istorii: Anna Pankratova and Eduard Bur-
dzhalov. All three had hitherto been in the main loyal to the Stalin regime,
especially Sidorov, who had played a leading role in the viciously anti-
Semitic ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign (1948–52). Here we encounter a
paradox about the initial moving forces for the rejuvenation of historical
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 175
writing: just as the vanguard of de-Stalinization was made up of politicians
who had been close allies of Stalin himself, so too some historians who
had played an orthodox and even extremely reactionary role under
Stalin laid the ground work for the reinvigoration of historiography in the
post-Stalin era. It was a measure of the importance that the new Soviet
leadership attached to historical science that they appointed Central Com-
mittee member and soon to be academician, Pankratova, to head up this
process.9
The benefits for historiography were quickly forthcoming. In the new
editors’ first editorial, published in issue No. 6 of the journal in 1953, they
declared their primary task to be struggling against the ‘cult of the person-
ality’ and demonstrating that the ‘masses [were] the driving force of histor-
ical development’.10 In the three years before the 20th Congress many
indicators of the gathering storm in historical science were reflected on the
pages of Voprosy istorii, as historians struggled to throw off Stalin’s malev-
olent legacy and establish history as a discipline rather than as a mere
agency for agitation and propaganda. Vigorous discussions were initiated,
for instance, on the basic economic laws of feudalism, on the colonial pol-
icies of the Tsarist empire and on the periodization of the history of Soviet
society, which some historians argued did not need to conform to that
advanced in the Short Course. Of course, such discussions were strictly
confined within doctrinal orthodoxy: ‘Everything in contradiction with
Marxism needs to be stigmatized and thrown out’, declared one contribu-
tor in May 1955.11 And historians were still subservient to their political
overlords. It is a telling statement of the degree of political and organi-
zational subordination of Soviet historiography that in 1954 even the
leading historian Militsa Nechkina could beseech the Academic Secretary
to the Division of History within the Soviet Academy of Sciences as to
whether there was any possibility of ‘the development on the common
basis of Marxism of varied schools and directions within science’.12
Clearly, the discussions initiated by Voprosy istorii were still subject to
‘sanctioned freedom’.13 The party leadership retained the final word on
what constituted historical truth, the arbitrariness of which was extremely
intimidating for any historian. The party also retained the instruments to
enforce it, particularly the Argus-eyed Department of Science and Culture
of the Central Committee, which kept the social sciences under surveil-
lance. While in 1954 the Department of Science and Culture showed no
concern about the direction in which Pankratova and Burdzhalov were
taking their journal,14 in spring-summer 1955 it condemned Voprosy istorii
for lacking ‘ideological-political consistency’ and ‘serious methodological
mistakes’.15 Yet, thanks to the adroit manoeuvring of Pankratova, includ-
ing appeals to the party leadership, the editors were able to keep the
Department of Science and Culture at bay.16 The advent of the 20th Party
Congress provided an unprecedented opportunity for Voprosy istorii to
become a tribune of anti-Stalinist historical revisionism.
176 Roger D. Markwick
The 20th Party Congress
Khrushchev’s ringing denunciation of Stalin in his Secret Speech sent
shock waves through Soviet society and the international communist
movement. The dethronement of Stalin could hardly leave Soviet histori-
ography untouched. Even before the main shock there were several
tremors among politicians and historians alike. At the congress itself
Anastas Mikoian bemoaned the theoretical poverty of Soviet social
science as a whole, singling out party and Soviet history as its ‘most back-
ward’ branch.17 Likewise, Academician Pankratova attributed the over-
simplification, embellishment and modernization of the past by historians
to the ‘cult of the personality’, without mentioning Stalin by name. Reject-
ing the view that scholarship developed by ‘edicts and votes’, she extolled
the virtues of unfettered discussion for the development of historical
writing,18 a stance that would soon be her undoing.
Whereas nobody dared link Stalin to the ‘cult of the personality’ at the
congress itself, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech put Stalin firmly at its centre.
But Khrushchev deliberately divorced the personality cult from the role of
the party, its leadership, or any broader social forces. His analysis was tan-
tamount to a ‘Great Man’ theory of history, couched of course in
Marxist–Leninist verbiage.19 Almost immediately, however, the party
leadership sought to put a cap on the de-Stalinization process, reflecting
the resilience of Stalinism, personified by Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar’
Kaganovich and Georgii Malenkov, behind the facade of ‘collective
leadership’. The 5 March 1956 resolution endorsing Khrushchev’s report
did not mention Stalin by name.20 The ‘heated discussions’ about the Stalin
period which subsequently took place both publicly and privately, nur-
tured by the millions who had returned from the camps and the posthu-
mous rehabilitation of thousands of victims of the terror,21 were
denounced in the party press as pretexts for ‘scandalous calumnies’ against
the overall course pursued by the party.22 Particularly unnerved by distur-
bances in Poland, the leadership’s retreat from the agenda of the 20th
Party Congress was codified in the June 1956 Central Committee resolu-
tion ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Personality and its Consequences’.
The resolution baulked at outright condemnation of Stalin and acknow-
ledged his contribution to the party, the nation and the international revo-
lutionary movement. Straddling determinism and contingency, the
resolution pointed to both ‘objective, specific historical conditions’ and
‘certain subjective factors, connected with Stalin’s personal qualities’ to
explain the Stalin phenomenon. The stress, however, was on Stalin’s ‘mis-
takes’, and the resolution pointedly repudiated any systemic explanation
for Stalinism.23
This ambivalent attitude of the CPSU leadership toward the Stalin phe-
nomenon, fuelled by the Polish and Hungarian upheavals of 1956, which
particularly alarmed Khrushchev, was a crucial element in the political
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 177
environment of the revisionist historians from the mid-1950s to the mid-
1960s. Such was the centrality of the Stalin myth to the legitimacy of the
Soviet system. Soviet historical revisionism expressed this constant tension
between what was historiographically possible and what was politically
permissible in the Khrushchev decade. This was evident from the fate of
Voprosy istorii.

The Burdzhalov affair

Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ condemnation of Stalin was subsequently circulated
and discussed at thousands of party meetings across the country. But such
‘public’ discussion was anticipated by Voprosy istorii a month before the
20th Congress when it convened in Moscow the first of several ‘readers’
conferences’. Voprosy istorii thereby became the vehicle for re-establishing
the historical community by organizing large-scale discussions of historians.
It was these ‘readers’ conferences’, coupled with the publication in the
journal of some impermissible ‘Trotskyite’ views, that triggered the notori-
ous ‘Burdzhalov affair’ of 1956–57.
At the January 1956 conference, 600 historians participated in three
days of intense discussion. Pankratova expressed the hope that Voprosy
istorii would become an ‘international tribune of Marxist history’. She
lamented, however, the shortcomings of many of the articles it published
for their ‘dogmatism, rote-learning, vulgarization, political fashionableness
and black-and-white representation of the past’.24 Burdzhalov was even
more forthright in his criticisms. Among other things, he called for the re-
evaluation of feudalism in Eastern Europe and Russia, of the nature of
Russian imperialism, of both Plekhanov and Lenin as historians, of Soviet
industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture and the early years
of the Great Patriotic War. He also condemned party historians, many of
whom had yet to go beyond the pronouncements of the Short Course. Bur-
dzhalov thus put on the agenda many of the issues that were to rack histor-
ical science over the next decade.
Once again, the Central Committee’s (renamed) Department of
Science and Higher Educational Establishments took a hostile view of
Burdzhalov’s presentation and of the conference as a whole. In a confiden-
tial report, Burdzhalov was taken to task for encroaching in a ‘free and
easy’ manner on a number of ‘established views’ concerning Soviet and
party history, for example, the Mensheviks in 1905 and anti-tsarist national
movements. At times, the report alleged, Burdzhalov’s interpretations
amounted to falsehood.25 What really aroused the ire of the Department
of Science was that Voprosy istorii had taken upon itself the task of organ-
izing discussions that went beyond the bounds of the role of the journal as
the department saw it. The editors allegedly had arrogated the right to
interpret the party’s wishes in regard to historical writing and even pre-
sented the journal as if it, rather than the party, had resurrected Lenin’s
178 Roger D. Markwick
role in Soviet history.26 In short, Burdzhalov and Pankratova had trans-
gressed the doctrinal and organizational boundaries of historical science.
Further, almost immediately after the 20th Congress a Voprosy istorii
editorial,27 personally written by Burdzhalov, confronted the causes of the
degradation of party history and proclaimed the journal’s determination to
revitalize historical science as a whole. The ensuing ‘cult of the personality
of I.V. Stalin led to the immediate distortion of historical truth’; but it was
the ‘task of historians’, Voprosy istorii editorialized, ‘to explain historical
facts, not to hush them up’.28 Hard on the heels of his audacious editorial
came Burdzhalov’s provocative article on the tactics of the Bolsheviks in
March–April 1917.29 Burdzhalov took issue with the misrepresentation in
party historiography of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev as treacherous
opportunists in relation to the provisional government while falsely
extolling Stalin as the consistent advocate of Lenin’s approach.30 Such criti-
cism of Stalin went far beyond the ‘Secret Speech’. Above all, Burdzhalov’s
exposure of Stalin’s role in March–April 1917 was perilously close to Trot-
skyism. It was precisely Stalin’s cover-up of his conciliatory approach to the
provisional government that lay at the heart of Trotsky’s denunciation of
the ‘Stalin school of falsification’.31 At two further readers’ conferences in
June 1956 in Leningrad and Kiev, Burdzhalov repudiated the Short Course
as a ‘handbook’ for historians. The work as a whole, he declared, was
effectively a denial of Marxism and discredited as a basis for scholarship.32
In the year following the 20th Party Congress, Voprosy istorii was
engaged in a constant ‘dialogue’ with its readership that fostered the re-
emergence of a community of historians.33 In these discussions, in their
editorials and in the correspondence with the party leadership, Burdzhalov
and Pankratova emphasized that they were acting on the spirit of the 20th
Party Congress, the ‘decisive turning point in every facet of our life – polit-
ical, economic, international and scientific-ideological’.34 Unfortunately,
the fact that Burdzhalov and Pankratova sincerely believed that their cam-
paign to regenerate historical science was fully in accord with the spirit of
the congress ultimately was no defence against Stalin’s still well
entrenched protégés.
The middle level apparatchiks of the Department of Science and the
newly established Department of Culture were intent on bringing the
editors to heel. However, in the first months after the 20th Party Congress,
Pankratova was able to ward them off with the support of Central Com-
mittee Secretary Dmitrii Shepilov and of Khrushchev himself, who
emerged as a crucial ‘arbiter’ in the dispute.35 Nevertheless the appa-
ratchiks conspired against the journal. Following the adoption in June
1956 of the Central Committee resolution ‘On overcoming the cult of the
personality’ they unleashed a vitriolic campaign in the party press, which
grew especially shrill in the wake of the Hungarian and Polish events of
October 1956.36 Driven by the vindictiveness of a party apparatus that
would not brook any challenge to its authority, on the floor of the readers’
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 179
conferences and within academic and party institutions, the campaign
against Voprosy istorii and its revisionist editors gathered pace, culminat-
ing in Burdzhalov’s dismissal from the editorial board in March 1957 and
Pankratova’s premature death two months later, 25 May 1957.37
Burdzhalov and Pankratova, it seems, were casualties of the so-called
‘anti-party’ group’s counter-offensive against the de-Stalinization cam-
paign unleashed by the 20th Party Congress. They lost not only the crucial
support of Shepilov, who supported the ‘anti-party’ group, but also of
Khrushchev.38 All their appeals to the highest echelons of the party,
including Khrushchev himself, to defend Voprosy istorii and to repudiate
the calumniations against them fell on deaf ears.39 In the 9 March 1957
Central Committee resolution, ‘Concerning the Journal Voprosy istorii’,
Burdzhalov was singled out for his alleged departures from ‘Leninist prin-
ciples of partiinost’ in history’.40
Their defeat was decisive. By 1958, Voprosy istorii had fallen com-
pletely under the tutelage of the Department of Science, although a cam-
paign to root out ‘Burdzhalovism’ continued right until the end of the
1960s.41 It was not just Voprosy istorii that was brought into line by the
March 1957 resolution. It was used to snuff out any ‘spark of dissent’.42
Partiinost’ was re-emphasized, reinforced by a strident ‘struggle against
bourgeois ideology’.43 In this environment the majority of historians once
again cleaved to Soviet historiographical orthodoxies. Marxism–Leninism
was affirmed as the acme of social sciences, the laws of which provided the
exclusive key to understanding past and present, while bankrupt ‘bour-
geois’ historiography could offer nothing. In this scenario, ‘conjunctural-
ism’ reigned: once again historians were reduced to ‘illustrating’ the latest
twist and turn of party policy.

Seeding revisionism
Nevertheless, even these measures were insufficient to halt the advance of
historical thought. The 20th Party Congress had been a watershed in
Soviet political life, shaking the political convictions of many historians
who hitherto had been resolute Stalinists. Some of the most illustrious
revisionists of the 1960s, such as Gefter and Pavel Volobuev, both of
whom were hostile towards Burdzhalov, were evidently profoundly
shaken by the denunciation of Stalin and the anti-Stalinist shift in social
consciousness amongst the intellectual ‘children of the 20th Congress’.
Volobuev, who as a bureaucratic overseer within the Department of
Science until October 1955 had relentlessly pursued Pankratova and Bur-
dzhalov for their alleged ‘Trotskyism’,44 by 1957 was well on the way to
abandoning what he later described as his ‘dogmatic pro-Stalinist views’.45
Volobuev’s experiences exemplify the sharp rupture in the political
outlook of the shestidesiatniki (‘people of the sixties’) which subsequently
drove historical revisionism, despite party attempts to contain it.
180 Roger D. Markwick
Ironically, despite the setback that historiography suffered in the wake
of the ‘Burdzhalov affair’, the party’s own initiatives – notably the post-
Stalin Thaw in intellectual life under Khrushchev, coupled with increased
investment in historical research and writing – wittingly or unwittingly,
fostered historical revisionism. Liberalization at home was reinforced by
contact with the international community of historians. Already, in Sep-
tember 1955 Pankratova, due to the support of Khrushchev, led a delega-
tion of Soviet historians to Rome to participate in the International
Congress of Historians, the first delegation since 1933.46
Exposure to the West was undoubtedly a leavening experience for
Soviet historians,47 but the most important influences and initiatives were
domestic, especially after the 20th Party Congress: an expansion in the
number of historical journals, the growth of research themes, vastly
increased publication of documents and access to archives, the establish-
ment of new research institutes and of specialist historical subdivisions
within the Academy of Sciences. In addition, a proliferation of All-Union
interdisciplinary Scientific Councils and conferences encouraged scholarly
collaboration.
These initiatives enabled revisionism quietly to survive and even
develop, despite the renewed ideological pressures. The editor of the
newly established (1957) historical journal Istoriia SSSR (History of the
USSR), Maksim Kim, masking his revisionist sympathies with official
nomenclature but without once mentioning partiinost’, promoted ‘specific-
historical’ research as the antidote to ‘dogmatism’.48 Likewise, Academi-
cian Nechkina’s ambitious initiatives for the systematic study of
historiography, particularly the Scientific Council on ‘The history of histor-
ical science’, which she established in 1958 and led from 1961, promoted
the study of historical methodology and theory in Russian historiography
and the Marxist classics.49
In this regard, a crucial intellectual spur to historical revisionism was the
publication of the complete, fifth edition of the Collected Works of Lenin
between 1958 and 1965 (purged of some of his more violent utterances).50
Leninism was a two-edged sword within post-Stalin historical discourse.
Citing from Lenin, where once one cited from Stalin, could be used to stifle
discussion or merely to demonstrate orthodoxy. For other historians,
however, Lenin’s thinking provided the cutting-edge of revisionism.
However, deference to Lenin’s thought as inviolable axioms demonstrated
both the limits of Soviet revisionism and its subversive potential within the
rigid intellectual environment of official Marxism–Leninism.

The Great Patriotic War

The limits and ambiguities of historical revisionism in the wake of the 20th
Party Congress are well illustrated by the historiography of the Second
World War. Under Stalin, the Soviet victory over Nazism became synony-
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 181
mous with Stalin’s ‘genius’ and a crucial component of the Stalin cult
during post-war reconstruction. In the decade following the war, Soviet
historians retailed the triumphant version of events sanctioned by Stalin.
Official clichés about the Soviet Union’s ‘peace-loving’ foreign policy,
especially Stalin’s August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany,
and his allegedly ‘wise’ pursuit of ‘active defence’ in 1941–42, were uncriti-
cally recapitulated by Soviet historians. Dependent as they were on pub-
lished sources and denied access to archives or diplomatic documents,
historians were ignorant about the pact’s secret protocols, inter alia, incor-
porating the Baltics into the Soviet Union, and they were necessarily silent
about Stalin’s responsibility for the catastrophic defeats of 1941–42.51
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech changed much of this. He audaciously
blamed Stalin’s ‘incompetent’ leadership for the initial defeats, in particu-
lar his failure to heed dire warnings of the impending attack, and his ‘ner-
vousness and hysteria’ for subsequent disasters. He mocked Stalin’s
so-called ‘active defence’ and blamed his paranoia for the ‘mass repres-
sion’ which decapitated the military in 1937–41. Khrushchev opened the
door for revisionism by calling on historians to research the war, as much
for its ‘political, educative and practical significance’ as its ‘historical
significance’.52
Over the next decade historians took up Khrushchev’s call. In addition
to the new Military-Historical Journal, several major centres dedicated to
military history were established under a variety of authorities, including
the Institute of Marxism–Leninism, the General Staff and the Soviet
Academy of Sciences. The result was the publication of a vast amount of
material about the war, including a six-volume history and new documen-
tary sources. Under the imprint of the Academy Sciences’ press ‘Nauka’,
headed by the liberal academician Aleksandr Samsonov, a stream of
books and military memoirs was published.53
Despite this plethora of publications, its overall impact on the historiog-
raphy of the war was limited. The historiography of the war remained con-
strained not only by a dearth of serious research but even more so by the
shallow ‘cult of the personality’ analytical framework expounded in party
resolutions. Whereas prior to the 20th Party Congress historians attributed
Soviet military successes to Stalin’s ‘genius’, afterwards he was blamed for
all the defeats and the communist party was proclaimed the true architect
of victory. A partial exception to such simplistic analyses was Aleksandr
Nekrich’s monograph June 22, 1941. Written in the Khrushchev period but
not published until September 1965, it not only held Stalin directly
responsible for the initial Soviet defeats but also ‘for the first time in
Soviet literature’ argued that the non-aggression pact had advantaged
Nazi Germany rather than the Soviet Union.54 But even his book, while it
questioned fundamental aspects of party history, did not present a funda-
mental challenge to Soviet historical theory or methodology. Those chal-
lenges came in other fields.
182 Roger D. Markwick
The New Direction
The principal example of the contradictions of Soviet revisionism in the
Khrushchev period is the emergence of the so-called ‘New Direction’
(novoe napravlenie) historians under the patronage of Arkady Sidorov,
director of the Institute of History. Sidorov had vehemently opposed Bur-
dzhalov and Pankratova, and supported researchers like Gefter and
Volobuev, who likewise had pitted themselves against Voprosy istorii. Yet,
ironically, Gefter and Volobuev would emerge as the leading lights of the
New Direction revisionists.
In 1954–57, the very years in which Pankratova and Burdzhalov were
leading the charge for revisionism, from the ranks of their principal adver-
saries emerged the ‘school of Professor A.L. Sidorov’,55 which formed the
‘kernel of a new scientific direction’ that ultimately became the New
Direction in 1965.56 The challenge to the prevailing Short Course paradigm
that these scholars presented came not from rewriting party history, as it
had with Burdzhalov, but more indirectly. Initially, it was through their
reconsideration of the history of Russian imperialism. Subsequently, it was
through their application of the concept of ‘multistructuredness’ (mno-
goukladnost’) to pre-revolutionary Russian society, from what started out
as an empirical inquiry into the economic preconditions of the October
Revolution. For this undertaking, the crude deterministic conceptions of
the Short Course were inadequate. These historians had to work their way
through this question. The 20th Party Congress provided the space and
stimulus to pursue this. It was an intense re-reading of Lenin that provided
the way forward. But even then the path was far from straight.
Up until Stalin’s death in 1953 it was an unassailable orthodoxy, for-
mally incorporated into the Short Course, that Tsarist Russia was a semi-
colony of the Western imperialist powers. Though gradually challenged by
researchers, it was not until after the 20th Party Congress that a frontal
assault was made on the concept by Sidorov’s students who were intent on
demonstrating, on the basis of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and detailed
research, that Tsarist Russia, despite its backwardness, possessed the
necessary development of monopoly capital for the victory of the October
Revolution. But at this stage there was a contradiction; in repudiating
Stalin’s ‘semi-colony’ thesis, these historians embraced the anti-Trotskyist
position that Russia was a full-fledged imperialist state, ripe for the con-
struction of ‘socialism in one country’.57 But as their research into the
development of capitalism in the cities and the countryside developed
through the 1950s, it became increasingly apparent that Tsarist Russia was
not a full-fledged capitalist state. On the contrary, it was characterized by a
complex combination of islands of advanced financial-industrial capital in
the cities swamped by a sea of semi-feudal relations in a backward coun-
tryside. In short, Russia was a ‘multistructured’ society, as it came to be
formulated by the mid-1960s, towards the end of the Khrushchev period.
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 183
However, it was not until the Brezhnev period that the New Direction’s
advocacy of ‘multistructuralism’ became politically contentious. ‘Multi-
structuralism’ was a concept that called in question whether the October
1917 Revolution was the inexorable product of law-driven economic
development, as Short Course conceptions would have it. ‘Multistructural-
ism’ therefore struck at the heart of the historical legitimacy of the social-
ist origins and nature of the Soviet state and all that flowed from it,
including the forced collectivization of agriculture. It was also open to the
subversive charge of Trotskyism, echoing as it did (though purely coinci-
dentally) Trotsky’s notion of ‘combined and uneven development’.58 With
the ousting of Khrushchev and the ensuing neo-Stalinist counter-offensive,
such notions would sound the death knell of the New Direction.
The intellectual evolution of the New Direction revisionists illustrates
the struggle for Soviet historians in sloughing off the dogmatic historical
conceptions instilled by Stalin, and only partially challenged in the wake of
the 20th Party Congress. The neo-Stalinist editorial board of Voprosy
istorii ensconced after Burdzhalov and Pankratova had terminated debate
around the dependent status of Tsarist Russia.59 But the emergence of the
New Direction also indicates the shift in historical thinking engendered by
Khrushchev’s Stalin revelations and the tenacity of certain attributes of
Russian historiography that had survived the Stalin era, in this case
through Sidorov who instilled in his students the necessity for archival
research and a ‘love of methodological questions’.60

Collectivization
Despite Sidorov’s Stalinist credentials, as director of the Institute of
History he was also father to another revisionist trend, even more politic-
ally fraught than ‘multistructuralism’: the historiography of the collec-
tivization of agriculture, which was pivotal to the Stalin myth. Stalin’s
triumphalist Short Course history asserted that with ‘full-scale collectiviza-
tion’ and the ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’ in 1929–34, the basic
problems of Soviet agriculture had been solved and the basis laid for
socialist relations in the countryside and the Soviet Union as a whole.61
The seeds for a radical rewriting of the history of collectivization were
sown soon after Stalin’s death by a protégé of Sidorov, Viktor Danilov,
who was to emerge as a leader of historical revisionism. Taking advantage
of the post-Stalin Thaw, Danilov’s research repudiated Stalinist wisdom
that in 1929 the Soviet Union possessed the necessary material and tech-
nical prerequisites for the complete collectivization of agriculture.62 With
the encouragement of Sidorov, Danilov published his research in 1956–57.
It provoked a stream of protests to the Central Committee, forcing
Danilov to rebut charges that his work was ‘anti-party’. Nevertheless, in
1958 Danilov provided further ammunition against premature, forced,
collectivization by resurrecting the significance of the village commune
184 Roger D. Markwick
(obshchina) in the late 1920s, which had disappeared from the lexicon of
Soviet historiography.63
In 1958 Sidorov appointed Danilov head of a research Group on the
History of the Soviet Peasantry. The establishment of the research group
was part of Sidorov’s personal campaign against the Stalinist generation of
historians and against the influx of Stalinist bureaucrats then being purged
from the Central Committee apparatus who were being appointed
researchers in the Institute.64 But there was also a larger political impera-
tive, in keeping with the requirement in Soviet political culture that histor-
ical science dovetail with contemporary political needs. Addressing the
parlous state of Soviet agriculture bequeathed by Stalin was one of
Khrushchev’s major priorities. The history of Soviet agriculture was there-
fore a research priority.
The first fruits of the collective researches of Danilov’s group were
evident at a major conference which it helped organize on the Soviet peas-
antry and collectivization held in Moscow in April 1961. Already, he was
repudiating clichéd Stalinist conceptions about capitalism prevailing in the
countryside, which had justified full-scale forced collectivization. Instead,
he argued for a ‘complex combination’ of social relations, a notion akin to
the New Direction’s ‘multistructuralism’,65 which implied there should
have been incremental collectivization through agricultural cooperatives.
At the same conference other members of Danilov’s group boldly criti-
cized the orthodox history of Sergei Trapeznikov, Brezhnev’s future head
of the Department of Science and scourge of historical revisionism.
Apart from their distinctive analysis, what distinguished Danilov’s revi-
sionists from Stalinist antagonists such as Trapeznikov was that they actu-
ally undertook research, including in archives, rather than simply
elaborating party resolutions. This was most evident in the massive
798-page manuscript they produced for publication in 1964: The Collec-
tivization of Agriculture in the USSR 1927–1932.66 Overall, Danilov’s
unpublished monograph condemned Stalin’s forced collectivization, based
on Danilov’s view that the poor and middle peasantry, among whom tradi-
tional family ownership prevailed, were not ready for full-scale collec-
tivization. In blaming Stalin and his circle for the excesses and failings of
collectivization, the revisionists’ critique was in the true spirit of
Khrushchev reformism and consistent with Khrushchev’s condemnation of
the ‘cult of the personality’. However, with the dismissal of Khrushchev as
CPSU First Secretary on 14 October 1964, the way was open for the neo-
Stalinists to turn back the tide of historical revisionism. The very first to
feel the chill of the Brezhnevite reaction against Khrushchev’s erratic
reformism was Viktor Danilov. Accused of ‘grieving’ for Khrushchev,
within 24 hours of Khrushchev’s dismissal, Danilov was ordered to with-
draw the proofs of his history of collectivization. The manuscript was
never to see the light of day.
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 185
Professionalism and methodology
Ironically, the professionalism that attended the work of revisionists such
as the New Direction and Danilov’s group was facilitated by the commu-
nist party’s renewed commitment to historical science in the wake of the
Burdzhalov affair. From 1960 onwards the party gave top priority to pro-
fessionalizing history, if only to perfect it as an instrument of party policy,
and this course was embraced even by conservative historians who had
been dismayed by the Burdzhalov affair. Over the next decade the resul-
tant quantitative expansion of research and the encouragement of new
fields, such as historiography, stimulated the simultaneous ‘co-existence of
regressive and progressive tendencies’ in history. At the same time it fos-
tered an unprecedented ‘dialogue’ between the historical guild and the
party,67 which was rudely interrupted after the fall of Khrushchev.
The 22nd Party Congress (1961), which renewed Khrushchev’s assault
on Stalin, further spurred historical revisionism. Late 1961 saw the posthu-
mous, partial rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovsky. He was re-instated as a
Bolshevik and accorded guarded recognition of his achievements as a his-
torian.68 Further, the programmatic conviction that communism was on
the horizon impelled the party to convene the 2,000-strong all-Union con-
ference of historians in December 1962. Whilst the formal agenda of the
conference was the training of historians, the real agenda was to ensure
that historians served the immediate needs of the party.69 Official calls to
bury the ‘cult of the personality’ in historical writing once and for all were
coupled with cautions against those who would use this interment as a
‘pretext’ to undermine Marxism–Leninism.70 Nevertheless this did not
prevent many of the historians present, including senior academicians,
from publicly voicing their concerns in a way not seen since the Voprosy
istorii readers’ conferences six years earlier. Unfortunately, the furious
struggle then being waged within the party leadership around de-Staliniza-
tion prevented much of the potential of the all-Union conference from
being realized, particularly in the field of party history.71
The need for Soviet historians to attend to methodological questions
had also been a concern at the all-Union conference, a concern shared by
the party Central Committee which in June 1963 called for greater
emphasis on ideology to facilitate the alleged transition to communism and
combat the pernicious influence of ‘bourgeois ideology’.72 As a result, a
general meeting of the Academy of Sciences held that year emphasized the
‘importance and immediacy of methodological questions’ and its Presidium
authorized discussions on methodology in all research institutions.73
These party and academic initiatives in the mid-1960s in relation to
historical theory and methodology evidently answered the needs of a
growing number of revisionist scholars, for whom they derived from the
‘logic of research’ itself. Herein lay the germs of conflict between the
growing community of revisionist scholars and their academic and political
186 Roger D. Markwick
overlords: the one anxious to shed the doctrinal baggage of Stalinism, the
other increasingly intent on re-appropriating it. Conservative containment
of historical revisionism did not depend entirely on the vigilance of the
Central Committee’s Department of Science. The Central Committee had
its allies among those historians who made their careers by defending
every shift of the party line on a given historical issue. Trapeznikov,
Brezhnev’s future scholar-vigilante, made his reputation as an orthodox
chronicler of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. Isaac Mints, the con-
summate adherent to partiinost’, survived and prospered by choosing a
field that would demonstrate his loyalty – ‘unmasking’ imperialist instiga-
tion of the civil war (1918–20) – and actively contributing to Stalin’s Short
Course history and its post-1956 congress successor, the History of the
CPSU, seven editions of which were edited by the arch-Stalinist Boris
Ponomarev.74 Within the Institute of History intellectual compliance was
policed by concentrating power in the hands of its director, nominated by
the Central Committee. The bureaucrat-scholar Vladimir Khvostov, direc-
tor of the institute from 1959 to 1967, was the ‘most influential and power-
ful individual in the field of history’ in these years. Khvostov reinforced his
tutelage not only by his control over the institute party committee but also
by resorting to divide and rule, playing off party hacks and informers
within the institute against dissenting scholars.75

History and sociology

The year 1964 was crucial for historical revisionism. Historiographically, it
opened propitiously with the beginnings of an intense engagement with
methodological questions. Politically, it ended ominously with the dis-
missal of Khrushchev as CPSU First Secretary. A major initiative for sys-
tematic consideration of methodological questions was the conference of
historians, philosophers and other scholars on ‘History and Sociology’ con-
vened in January 1964.76 The conference discussed a myriad of unresolved
methodological and philosophical problems in historical science, reflecting
the broad range of institutional input.77 The conference was viewed by the
revisionist Gefter as a ‘vital step towards overcoming serious inadequacies
in the methodology of history’.78
The position paper for the conference was presented not by historians
but by two conservative philosopher-academicians who attributed the
poverty of Soviet historiography to the divorce between history and soci-
ology. The key to the renovation of historical writing, they argued, was its
methodological renewal, which would better equip historians to tackle the
‘problems of the present’. And the best guarantee of history’s methodo-
logical renewal was to forge an alliance between philosophers and histor-
ians,79 an injunction that once again reduced historians to merely
illustrating the general sociological laws of historical materialism. Further,
in the guise of the struggle to overcome the negative consequences of the
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 187
‘cult of the personality’, these philosopher-academicians enjoined histor-
ians to engage not so much with the past as with the contemporary
struggle against ‘bourgeois ideology’. In the absence of a Soviet political
science or sociology, the priority for historical science was to address
current international developments, thereby impoverishing historical
research and reinforcing the political subordination of historical science.80
Despite the constraints imposed by the report, the ensuing discussion
revealed that the historians, while paying lip service to its injunctions,
generally had much more to contribute than the philosophers. For Gefter,
charting the future direction of historical science required ‘elaborating
both the theory of the historical process and also its method of study’.81
But any attempt to divorce the methodology and/or philosophy of history
from historical materialism was anathema to the guardians of orthodoxy
such as Mints,82 who had deep reservations about the precipitous establish-
ment of seminars and sectors dedicated exclusively to methodology. But it
was a little too late. Gefter’s Sector of Methodology in the Institute of
History was already up and running.

The Sector of Methodology

The Sector of Methodology was, in every sense, the realization of the
injunctions of the convenors of the History and Sociology conference that
high priority be given to organizing seminars within and between institutes
of the Academy of Sciences that would directly address questions of
methodology in history.83 Thus from the outset the sector was not an
‘alternative’ formation of dissident historians but an officially endorsed
subdivision within the Institute of History. However, the aims and
methods of work of the sector were largely decided by the collective of
researchers that organized and participated in it and they often went far
beyond the bounds intended by their academic overseers. The sector did
not limit itself to the elimination of the ‘negative consequences of the cult
of the personality’ in historical science. Rather, it sought ways to throw off
the dogmatism and scholasticism which had encrusted Soviet historiogra-
phy and to overcome the divorce between the theoretical disciplines, espe-
cially that of social philosophy, and actual historical research.
Surviving some four years after Khrushchev’s ousting (it was finally
closed in 1969), the sector proved to be a particularly crucial site of contes-
tation between the academic apparatchiks and the revisionist intelli-
gentsia. During its brief, four-year existence was concentrated a clash of
unequal forces over the future direction of social science and ideology in
the USSR. At the first session of the sector, which convened in February
1964, its director and moving spirit Gefter outlined the basic objectives of
its work. The axis of Gefter’s thesis was that ‘entire epochs must be reread
anew’ since the ‘contemporary world needs to be explained historically’.
Moreover, the very ‘meaning of the categories and concepts must change
188 Roger D. Markwick
from the point of view of the progress of humanity as a whole’.84 In this
respect Gefter noted the importance of the international context, particu-
larly of the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave
additional impetus to historical thinking. Accordingly, the fundamental
objective of the sector was deemed to be the overcoming of the gulf
between specific historical research and the theoretical disciplines, in
which prevailed an abstract method divorced from historical reality.85
These objectives were reflected in the proposed organization of the
sector’s work. In particular, there was to be a conscious attempt to over-
come the limits of ‘petty specialities’ which fragmented theory and specific
research. Within the Institute of History the sector should not be, in
Gefter’s words, ‘an isolated unit’ but ‘the active kernel of collaborative
work for the entire institute’.86 In this regard the sector exceeded its own
expectations. It became a pole of attraction not only for theoretically
inclined, anti-Stalinist researchers from the Institute of History itself but
also for scholars from other research institutions: historians with a variety
of specialities, philosophers, economists, ethnographers, orientalists, Slav-
ists and linguists. Scholars from a broad range of institutes participated in
the work of the sector. The sector also acted as a conduit for some major
discussions among neo-Marxists in Western and East Central Europe.87
The fact that the discussions of the sector spilled over into other disci-
plines, such as theoretical ethnography, is a measure of the degree to
which the quest of the shestidesiatniki to reinvigorate historical science was
the catalyst for revisionism in a range of allied disciplines.88
However, in all these labyrinthine discussions by the professional
historians about the pernicious consequences of Stalin’s rule for historiog-
raphy there was a glaring omission. In the 1960s no professional historian
addressed the actual experience of the Stalin dictatorship or the nature of
Stalinism (a term that did not enter the Soviet lexicon until perestroika).
While there were numerous references to the ‘cult of the personality’ and
Stalin’s ‘crimes’, no Soviet historian directly engaged with the nature of
the Stalin phenomenon and its implications for Soviet socialism. Many of
the horrendous facts and figures relating to ‘mass repression’, ‘terror’ and
‘violations of Soviet legality’ under Stalin had become public knowledge
courtesy of the party since its 20th and particularly its 22nd congresses.
But it fell to writers, nurtured by Tvardovskii’s Novyi mir, rather than
historians to reflect openly on the Stalin experience, as both the writer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the poet Evgenii Evtushenko did respectively
in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and ‘The Heirs of Stalin’, both
published in 1962.89 Only one non-professional historian, the educationist
and future dissident Roy Medvedev, dared to depict and interrogate the
nightmare under Stalin in his Let History Judge, drafted in 1962–64, the
last years under Khrushchev, which perforce had to be published abroad.90
Medvedev’s tome reflected and drew considerably on the work of revision-
ist historians, including participants in the Sector of Methodology.91 But it
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 189
is indicative of the internalized and coercive constraints on the profes-
sional historians even in the Khrushchev era that they chose to focus on
the pernicious ‘consequences of the cult of the personality’ for historical
scholarship, as Ponomarev once again urged them to do at the 1962 All-
Union Conference of Historians,92 rather than the history of Stalinism
itself.

Conclusion
The ousting of Khrushchev was the beginning of the end for Soviet histor-
ical revisionism. Despite rear-guard resistance, including an attempt by the
revisionists to democratize the Institute of History through its party com-
mittee (1965–66), they were defeated and dispersed. After a prolonged,
vituperative assault on his book, Nekrich was expelled from the party in
1967. In 1968 the Institute of History itself was divided into two, breaking
it up as a collective. A year later Danilov was removed as head of histor-
ical research on the Soviet peasantry and Gefter’s Sector of Methodology
was closed. March 1973, after prolonged persecution by Trapeznikov’s
Department of Science, saw the dispersal of the last concerted attempt at
revisionism spawned in the Khrushchev period: the New Direction.
Khrushchev’s political reformism and Soviet historical revisionism had
gone hand in hand. In a political system in which history was central to its
legitimation, it could not be otherwise. In the words of one of the few
women revisionist historians, Liudmila Danilova, Khrushchev’s attempted
de-Stalinization was a ‘Second October Revolution’.93 Unfortunately, this
was not quite the case. Khrushchev had looked to the Soviet intelligentsia
for support for his reforms. But Khrushchev’s ‘awkward and erratic’ de-
Stalinization and his carrot and stick approach to the intelligentsia had
eroded much of their good will.94 Few were prepared to stand in his
defence when he was ousted in October 1964. Soviet historical science had
the most to lose from the demise of Khrushchev, for the logic of historical
revisionism went far beyond Khrushchev’s inconsistent de-Stalinization. It
would not be realized until the advent of perestroika.

Notes
1 Ia.S. Drabkin cited in R. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia. The
Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–1974, Houndmills: Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 48.
2 J. Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet
Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1976, 21–41.
3 N. Maslov, ‘ “Kratkii kurs istorii VKP (b)” – entsiklopediia i ideologiia stalin-
inizma i poststalinizma: 1838–1988 gg.’ in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istori-
ografiia , Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996,
pp. 240–73.
4 ‘Perestroika i istoricheskoe znanie’, in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Inogo ne dano – per-
estroika: glasnost’, demokratiia, sotsializm, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 498.
190 Roger D. Markwick
5 L. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke: Sovetskaia istoriografi ia pervogo
poslestalinskogo desiatiletiia, Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1997,
pp. 13–14.
6 Sidorova, Ottepel’, p. 31; L.A. Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke sered-
ina 50-x – seredina 60-x gg.’, in G.D. Alekseeva (ed.), Istoricheskaia nauka
Rossii v XX veke, Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997, pp. 245–6.
7 E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments,
1945–1957, trans. and ed. by Hugh Ragsdale, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe,
1998, p. 193.
8 Sidorova, Ottepel’, p. 32.
9 Joachim Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft 1953 bis 1991 Studien
zur Methodologie- und Organizationsgeschichte, Munchen: Otto Sagner, 1995,
pp. 18–20 and n. 10.
10 E. Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal “Voprosy istorii” v seredine 50-x godov’, Voprosy
istorii [VI], 9, 1989, 69–70.
11 Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 248.
12 Ibid., p. 249.
13 Ibid., p. 251.
14 A. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba vokrug zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” v
1954–1957 godakh’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, vol. 5, 2003, 149.
15 Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 250.
16 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 151; c.f. Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 251.
17 XX S’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza 14–25 fevralia 1956
goda. Stenografi cheskii otchet , Vol. 1, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo
politicheskoi literatury, 1956, p. 325.
18 Ibid., pp. 621–2.
19 N.S. Khrushchev, The S ‘ ecret’ Speech delivered to the closed session of the
Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, introduction
by Zh. Medvedev and R. Medvedev, Nottingham: Spokesman Books 1976.
20 V. Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS i ego istoricheskie real’nosti, Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, pp. 42, 46.
21 R. Medvedev, ‘The Stalin Question’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R.
Sharlet (eds), The Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980, p. 39.
22 Zhuravlev (ed.), XX s’’ezd KPSS, p. 44.
23 ‘Postanovlenie Ts KPSS o preodelenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii’, 30
iuniia 1956 g.’, in Khrestomatiia po istorii KPSS, vol. 2, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
politicheskoi literatury, 1989, pp. 413–30.
24 ‘Konferentsiia chitatelei zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” ’, VI, 1956, vol. 2, 200.
25 RGANI, 5/35/39/20-25.
26 Ibid., l.22.
27 ‘XX s’’ezd KPSS i zadachi issledovaniia istorii partii’, VI, 1956, vol. 3, 3–12.
28 Ibid., 4, 7.
29 E. Burdzhalov, ‘O taktike bol’shevikov v marte-aprele 1917 goda’, VI, 1956,
vol. 4, 38–56; Burdzhalov replied to his critics in ‘Eshche o taktike bol’shevikov
v marte-aprele 1917 goda’, VI, 1956, vol. 8, 109–14.
30 Burdzhalov, ‘O taktike’, pp. 38–9.
31 L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsifi cation , London: New Park Publications,
1974, pp. 146–50.
32 ‘Doklad E.N. Burdzhalova o sostoianiii sovetskoi istoricheskoi naukii i rabote
zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” (na vstreche c chitateliami 19–20 iuniia 1956 g. v
Leningradskom otedelenii instituta istorii AN SSSR)’, VI, 1989, vol. 9, 85–6; 11,
116.
33 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 73.
 Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 191
34 ‘Doklad E.N. Burdzhalova’, pp. 82–4.
35 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 154–5; Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 256.
36 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 76. C.f. Zubkova, Russia After the War, pp. 195–6.
37 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 80.
38 Ibid., p. 73; Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 156.
39 RGANI, 5/35/39/161; Gorodetsky, ‘Zhurnal’, pp. 78–9.
40 ‘Za leninskuiu partiinost’ v istoricheskoi nauke!’, VI, 1957, vol. 3, pp. 4–5, 8.
Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 152, 157, suggests Pankratova was just
as responsible, if not more so, than her deputy but ‘sacrificed’ him in a vain
attempt to ward off defeat.
41 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 158.
42 Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, p. 252.
43 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 54–5.
44 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 150, 153.
45 ‘Interviu s akademikom P.V. Volobuevym’, in G.N. Sevost’ianov (ed.),
Akademik P.V. Volobuev. Neopublikovanye raboty. Vospominania. Stat’i,
Moscow: Nauka, 2000, p. 26.
46 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 154.
47 See R. English, Russia and the Idea of the West. Gorbachev, Intellectuals and
the End of the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, esp.
Chs. 2–3.
48 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 58–9.
49 M. Vandalkovskaia, ‘Militsa Vasili’evna Nechkina’ in G.D. Alekseeva (ed.),
Istoricheskaia nauka Rossii v XX veke, Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997, p. 411.
50 Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, 242. C.f. Richard Pipes (ed.), The Unknown
Lenin: from the secret archive, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
51 V. Kulish, ‘Sovietskaia istoriografiia velikoi otechestvennoi voiny’, in Afanas’ev
(ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi
ia , pp. 274–81.
52 Ibid., p. 284.
53 Ibid., pp. 284–5.
54 A. Nekrich, Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, trans. D. Lineburgh,
Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991, pp. 107, 111, 169, 172.
55 K. Tarnovskii, ‘Put’ uchenogo’, Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 80, 1967, 233–5.
56 Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘Soviet Marxism and Absolutism’, Slavic Review,
vol. 30, no. 4, 1971, 859.
57 V. Polikarpov, ‘ “Novoe napravlenie” 50–70x-gg.: posledniaia diskussiia sovet-
skikh istorikov’, in Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi
ia , pp. 349–51.
58 Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, p. 103.
59 K. Tarnovsky, Sovetskaia istoriografi ia rossiiskogo imperializma , Moscow:
Nauka, 1964, pp. 195–6.
60 A. Sidorov, ‘Nekotorye razmyshleniia o trude i opyte istorika’, Istoriia SSSR,
1964, vol. 3, 124.
61 Istoriia vsesoyuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov): kratkii kurs,
Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952, 1st edn
1938, pp. 290–8.
62 Danilov, ‘Material’no-tekhnicheskaia baza sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR naka-
nune sploshnoi kollektivizatsii’, VI, 1956, vol. 3, 3–17.
63 Danilov, ‘Zemel’nye otnosheniia v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne’, Istoriia
SSSR, vol. 3, 1958, 90–128.
64 V.P. Danilov, interview with the author, 7 April 1992.
65 As he later made clear: Danilov, ‘Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie uklady v sovetskoi
dokolkhoznoi derevne: ikh sootnoshenie i vzaimodeistvie’, in Novaia
ekonomicheskaia politika: Voprosy teorii i istorii, Moscow: Nauka, 1974,
p. 62.
192 Roger D. Markwick
66 V.P. Danilov (ed.), ‘Kollektivizatsiia i kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR: Kollek-
tivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva v SSSR 1927–32’, Moscow: Mysl’, 1964. Unpub-
lished proofs.
67 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 296–7.
68 H. Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of M.N. Pokrovsky’, The Russian
Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1972, 49–63.
69 H. Rogger, ‘Politics, Ideology and History in the USSR: The Search for Coexis-
tence’, Soviet Studies, vol. 16, 1965, 259–62.
70 P. Pospelov, Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh podgotovki nauchno-
pedagogicheskih kadrov po istorichekskim naukam 18–21 dekabriia 1962 g.,
Moscow: Nauka, 1964, 200–1.
71 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, p. 112.
72 Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, pp. 285–7.
73 Istoria i sotsiologiia, Moscow: Nauka, 1964, p. 8.
74 Iu. Afanas’ev, ‘Fenomenon sovetskoi istorigrafii’, in Id. (ed.), Sovetskaia istori-
ografiia , p. 26.
75 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, pp. 107, 111, 169, 172.
76 Istoriia i sotsiologiia, p. 3.
77 Ibid., 326–7.
78 ‘Sostoianie i perspektivy razrabotki metodologii istoricheskoi nauki’ (unsigned,
undated manuscript, probably written by Gefter in 1969/70), p. 2.
79 Istoriia i sotsiologiia, pp. 9–11, 16, 23, 25–6, 28, 37.
80 Alekseeva, ‘Nekotorye voprosy’, pp. 288–90.
81 Ibid., 293–4; Istoriia i sotsiologiia, p. 144.
82 Ibid., pp. 73, 80–1, 144.
83 Ibid., pp. 336–9.
84 Arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi Istorii, 1/2188/267.
85 Gefter, ‘Plan’, ll. 267–8.
86 Ibid., l.268.
87 M. Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production, The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, pp. 80, 191.
88 V. Kabo, The Road to Australia. Memoirs, trans. R. Ireland, K. Windle, Can-
berra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1998, p. 225.
89 W. Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, New York: W.W. Norton,
2003, pp. 525–8.
90 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism,
2nd rev. edn, edited and trans. by George Shriver, New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1989, xiii.
91 Markwick, Rewriting History, pp. 242–3.
92 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, pp. 112–15.
93 Danilova, interview, 26 May 1992.
94 Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 381–3, 649.
10 The need for new voices
Writers’ Union policy towards
young writers 1953–64
Emily Lygo

In the 1940s, lyric poetry practically disappeared from print in the USSR,
and was produced only for the author’s desk drawer or the readership of
close and trusted associates. Zhdanov’s attack on Akhmatova in
Leningrad in 1946 confirmed the intelligentsia’s concern that lyric poetry
under Stalin had become a dirty word, and thus it remained until there was
a change at the highest level of power in 1953. Very soon after Stalin’s
death, Ol’ga Berggol’ts and other poets began to publish articles promot-
ing lyric poetry, and lyric poems returned to the pages of the thick journals
and newspapers, and to the stages of literary evenings.1 There followed an
upsurge in lyric poetry in the USSR: the public began to show more inter-
est in reading and listening to poetry, and a fashion developed, particularly
among young people, for writing poetry.2
Both at that time and in hindsight, commentators have attempted to
explain this ‘poetry phenomenon’ in terms which serve their own interpre-
tations of Soviet literary culture and history: unsurprisingly, these inter-
pretations can offer radically different explanations. At a meeting of the
Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union in 1963, the poet Nikolai Braun
attributed lyric poetry’s recent change in fortune to the atmosphere
created by the 20th and 22nd Party congresses:

How can we explain such an unprecedented interest among readers in

poetry? I think that it is the result of the atmosphere of attention to
and regard for literature and art which developed here after the XX
and XXII Party Congresses.3

Whilst there is some truth in this, Braun does not explain why it
was poetry, and not other creative pursuits, that revived at this point.
Others have suggested that as soon as Stalinism ended and its embargo on
lyric poetry was lifted, people in the USSR turned to this poetry for some
kind of spiritual nourishment that had been denied them by the politi-
cized, militarized, ideologically rigid and atheist culture of Stalinism. As
Deming Brown has said of the young poets who appeared during the
Thaw:
194 Emily Lygo
They came into prominence at a time when the liberal intelligentsia,
eager for release after long years of cultural repression and stagnation,
hoped fervently for a renaissance. The climate was relatively receptive
to expressions of youthful exuberance, irreverence, idealism and indi-
viduality . . . In their writings and platform performances they spoke
both for their generation and for their more frustrated and inhibited
elders.4

He unquestioningly accepts the poetry ‘boom’ of the Thaw as a sponta-

neous reaction to the end of Stalinism, leaving it unclear why poetry and
not some other genre, or a non-literary activity, fulfilled this requirement
among the intelligentsia at this point.
The present chapter will address the question of why lyric poetry came
into fashion, particularly among young people, after 1953. In doing so, it
will examine two key elements of Thaw culture which number among the
period’s defining characteristics: youth and poetry.5 Evgenii Evtushenko,
and other Moscow poets belonging to the ‘young literature’ (molodaia lit-
eratura) of the 1950s most obviously embodied these concepts. As the
most famous and influential of all young poets of the Thaw, however, their
cases are exceptional rather than typical for the period, and for this
reason, this chapter will take as a case study the situation in Leningrad,
where the Writers’ Union and literary journals did not experience such
extremes of liberalization,6 and poets were not in the limelight of the Thaw
poetry ‘boom’, but where, nonetheless, there were a great many young
poets writing and engaging in both official and unofficial literary activity.7
Drawing on previously unpublished material from the archive of the
Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union, I will suggest that this revival of
lyric poetry during the Khrushchev Thaw and, in particular, poetry’s
attraction for young people, occurred not because people spontaneously
began writing poetry after the death of a tyrant – there is every reason to
presume that ordinary people in the USSR, as well as published poets,
continued to write lyric poetry throughout the Stalinist period, even
though it was not published – but because at this point in time, poetry
became a concern of high-level party policy. I will show how, in response
to a demand for an improvement in Soviet poetry, the Leningrad branch
of the Writers’ Union set about encouraging and supporting young poets.
Official policy thus emerges as a decisive factor in bringing about the
fashion for poetry in the 1950s and early 1960s. The common representa-
tion of Thaw poetry as a ‘vehicle of expression for the oppositional mood
in the country’,8 is shown to be too superficial to describe the complexities
of the situation. Too often, the upsurge in poetry during the Thaw has
been unquestioningly accepted as the result of only the poets’ desire to
write with sincerity – the product of young poets’ ‘youthful tempera-
ments’, ‘exuberance’ and their being ‘more assertive, individualistic, and
candid than their elders’.9 In fact, as we shall see, enthusiasm for poetry
 The need for new voices 195
was purposely propagated by the Writers’ Union to meet party demands
for change in the genre.
The chapter will go on to show how the policy of encouraging young
writers, and especially poets, was put into practice through the develop-
ment of the system of LITOs, the conferences for young writers, and
opportunities to take part in readings and competitions. The origins of
this fashion are more complex than a ‘top-down’ model of policy
alone might suggest. I will proceed to examine the role of non-party
intelligentsia – whose influence in society increased during the Thaw –
in the shaping of the poetry phenomenon. The chapter will then trace
the demise of the liberal tendencies of the Thaw, and conclude by showing
how the leniency towards young writers was retracted in the early 1960s.
It will show how this process began as early as 1962, a year often con-
sidered to be well within the Thaw period. Case studies of the early
careers of two poets, Viktor Sosnora and Iosif Brodskii, will demonstrate
the effect that this change in policy had on the careers and fates of aspiring
young poets.
Archival material from the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union
provides a coherent explanation of one crucial factor which initiated the
poetry phenomenon of the Thaw: in 1953, lyric poetry was criticized by the
powers in Moscow for lagging behind the other literary genres in its
Socialist Realist development. In Leningrad, the appropriate response to
this criticism was discussed at a specially convened, three-day meeting in
November, at which members of the Union were called upon to identify
the causes of poetry’s slow development, and to offer strategies to redress
the problem.10 One major concern of the meeting, which was voiced by
many writers, emerged as the Writers’ Union’s practice in identifying,
encouraging and training young writers, and especially young poets.
The poet Elena Ryvina (1910–?) spoke at this meeting of her
experience of work with young writers in the city, and her understanding
of the problems that young poets had in publishing their work.11 She
related to the meeting a story about how one of the students at her literary
club wrote a beautiful poem about a rural landscape, which she judged to
express a profound love for his motherland, and hence to be eminently
suitable for publication. When the poet took his work to a newspaper
editor he was advised to add to the riverbank he had so picturesquely
described the detail of a hydro-electric power station glittering in the sun.
Ryvina deplored the malign influence of editors, who forced poets like her
student to edit their work before submitting it for publication.
Echoing the sentiment of Ryvina’s speech, many delegates at the
meeting argued for more frequent and representative publication of young
poets’ work, of which, it was claimed, there was deplorably little in print:
one writer complained that there were no opportunities for young poets to
publish at all. The poet Vadim Shefner (1915–2002) went as far as to
suggest that if the standard of Soviet poetry did not soon rise, readers
196 Emily Lygo
would come to assume that it could never be as good as the classics. He
urged the Writers’ Union:

We must be more bold in introducing young writers into poetry. We

must introduce them without a fuss, without talking down to them,
and without telling them off for their first failure. To have greater
respect for young people means to talk with them as adults.12

This meeting seems to have been the first time that an anxiety over the
development of the lyric was announced in Leningrad. The powerful con-
sensus that young poets might provide the accelerated development that
Soviet poetry needed in order to catch up with other genres influenced
policy in Leningrad over the subsequent decade, and was one major factor
which brought about very significant changes to the provision for young
poets in the city. This enthusiasm for young writers during the Thaw
should also be seen in the broader context of the authorities’ anxiety about
Soviet young people’s apathy. During the Thaw the political leadership
became aware that there was a problem with disaffection among young
people: official support for young writers fitted into this broader concern,
as it constituted one way of trying to re-engage young people with
society.13
Further evidence that the Union was advocating a liberal and encourag-
ing policy towards young poets is found at a meeting of the Board of the
Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union in April 1954.14 At a routine dis-
cussion of the thick journal Zvezda, the editors were criticized because the
poetry section was found to be weak. The cause of this shortcoming was
diagnosed as a lack of input from young writers. Sergei Orlov observed
that ‘. . . a failing of the poetry section [was] undoubtedly its weak promo-
tion of young poets who [were] at the beginning of their careers, of young
blood’. The selections of work by young poets of the post-war generation
which we find published fairly regularly in the thick journals in the
later 1950s were probably instigated as a response to this and similar
criticisms.15
In January 1955, 16 months after attention was initially turned to young
writers, Chivilikhin presented a report to the board of the Leningrad
Branch of the Writers’ Union entitled ‘The Implementation of Critical
Comments’.16 In this report, the Committee for Work with Young Writers
came under fire, and far-reaching recommendations for improvement
were made: Chivilikhin argued that the Committee should be enlarged,
and should cooperate more closely with the Committee for Admissions,
probably hoping thereby to increase the rate of admissions of young
writers to the Union. He even suggested that the Committee be given the
authority to make recommendations for publication, which was a privilege
conferred upon only the Sections of the Union for each genre, leaders of
conference seminars and editors:
 The need for new voices 197
We need to bring this committee into closer cooperation with the
Committee for Admissions. Perhaps even give the committee the right
to recommend the best works of literature by young authors to jour-
nals, almanacs and publishers, so that members of the committee do
not have to confine themselves to making general comments about the
lack of interest in young writers, but can make real recommendations
and suggestions.

It is apparent from the tone of this comment that the Committee for
Work with Young Writers was hitherto empowered to do little more than
comment on the failings of the system it served. Although the power to
give recommendations for publication was not conferred on its members,
the number of the membership was greatly expanded, and its profile thus
raised: at this meeting a total of 19 writers were named as the members of
the new committee.
As the policy of fostering young poets was taking hold, the Leningrad
branch of the Writers’ Union began to develop the existing institutional
structure of work with young writers. As early as 1953, the Writers’ Union
branch had agreed with a report that found the work of the Committee for
Work with Young Writers to be weak. Criticisms of the existing apparatus
which were made at a meeting in September went so far as to assert that
work with young writers did not really exist in Leningrad.17 It was explained
that a seminar, or LITO (literaturnoe ob’’edinenie, literary group) existed
which was nominally for young writers, but that the same ‘young’ writers
had been attending it for 15 years. These people, it was agreed, could no
longer be classed as young, and should no longer be in receipt of help from
the Union. At the end of the meeting, five resolutions were drawn up:

1 Abolish the group for young writers at the Writers’ Union branch,
and, instead, create groups at ‘Leningradskii almanakh’, and hopefully
at the journal Zvezda.
2 Try to attract young writers who have proved themselves to come and
work within the creative departments of the Writers’ Union, as this
will enable professional writers to exercise individual, creative leader-
ship over their younger counterparts.
3 Recommend that the Committee for Work with Young Writers pay
special attention to the work of the literary groups in the city, at facto-
ries, in clubs, and at institutes of higher education.
4 Examine the state of the long-running seminars and groups of young
writers.
5 Raise the standard of literary consultation for young writers. Give the
job of reviewing young writers’ manuscripts to experienced writers.

All these resolutions aimed at bringing young writers into closer contact
with the Union, where they could be observed and, if appropriate, given
198 Emily Lygo
special attention from established writers. Although the poet Britanishkii,
who belongs to the post-war generation targeted by these policies, has cyn-
ically suggested that such measures on the part of the Union were only
intended to control young writers, it does seem that the organization was
genuinely anxious to discover and recruit new talent, and was not only
concerned with the suppression of all literary activities outside its own aus-
pices.18 After the announcement in November that lyric poetry was in
need of accelerated development, the recruitment drive of the Union
became a pressing concern.
At a meeting of the Board of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’
Union in 1955, Gleb Semenov, the seminar leader of the Committee for
Work with Young Writers, gave a report on the developments in the com-
mittee’s work.19 Overall, he announced, it had been an excellent year, and
he lavished praise on the grass-roots organizations involved in the work
with young writers – the LITOs of the city – but criticized the central liter-
ary bodies for their lack of enthusiasm and support for those writers.
Many members of the Committee for Work with Young Writers had failed
to turn up to the meetings and had not taken on any responsibilities.
Semenov complained that members of the Union often paid lip-service to
the issue of work with young writers, but rarely acted upon the concerns
they voiced.
At the end of this meeting more resolutions were drawn up which
aimed to improve the current situation further:

1 To consider work with young writers to be a direct obligation of all the

creative sections of the Union.
2 To recommend to the editorship of the journal Neva that they normal-
ize the functioning of their LITO by providing it with a permanent
and experienced leader.
3 To recommend to the Leningrad Branch of the publishing house
Sovetskii pisatel’ that they include young poets in their LITO, and
support them by appointing an experienced leader.
4 To hold a general meeting of young writers on 27 November 1955,
which will be considered one form of educational work with young
writers. To oblige members of the Board to take an active part in the
organization and running of the meeting.
5 To admit that the Committee for Work with Young Writers needs to
activate its work. To instruct the secretariat to create a new authorita-
tive and hard-working committee.
6 To recognize the positive initiative of the publishing house ‘Sovetskii
pisatel’ ’ in its publication of the almanac Molodoi Leningrad, and to
consider it desirable that the almanac be produced once a year.

The almanac Molodoi Leningrad (‘Young Leningrad’) was indeed pro-

duced once a year, and became an important publication for poets who
 The need for new voices 199
were at the beginning of their careers but in a prominent enough position
to publish. It should be remembered, however, that the number of such
poets whose work appeared in the almanac was small, for most young
people did not publish their work officially.20 For the majority of poets, the
main forum for poetry in the city became, during the Thaw, the Union’s
system of LITOs, which had existed in pre-war Leningrad and in the
1940s, but was expanded during the Thaw. The groups were usually
attached to an Institute of Higher Education, House of Culture or a
factory and were run by members of the Union who received a monthly
payment for this service. During the Thaw, some LITOs became very
popular, and the high numbers of aspiring poets allowed these to become
selective workshops with high admission standards.
The most prestigious LITO in Leningrad in the 1950s was run by Gleb
Semenov at the Mining Institute from 1954–58.21 Other groups which
poets recall as having been prestigious during the Thaw included the
Narvskaia zastava (Narva gate), run by Natalya Grudinina (1918–?); the
Tsarskoe Selo LITO run by Tat’iana Gnedich (1907–80) and the Trudovye
rezervy (labour reserves) led by David Dar (1910–80). The latter three
teachers belonged to the generation of writers born at the turn of the
century who, like the more famous figures of Anna Akhmatova and Boris
Pasternak, possessed the knowledge and the traditions of the Russian
intelligentsia after which the younger generation so hankered. The system
of workshops recalled the studios of the Proletkul’t in the 1920s and
the atmosphere of creative freedom associated with that period, and the
LITOs which these teachers ran became havens of culture and tradition
for young people growing up in the aftermath of the Stalinist decimation
of pre-revolutionary intellectual culture. Elena Kumpan described the
meeting of these two generations thus:

They had waited a long time for someone in this world who still had
any need for their NON-SOVIET upbringing and world view, had
grown tired of waiting and had almost lost hope, and we . . . threw our-
selves at them and greedily absorbed, over at least three decades, their
experience, their stories, their opinions, their school, their libraries,
their SAMIZDAT, and, of course, the incomparable atmosphere of
their everyday lives . . . and their company.22

Seminars for translators held by El’ga Linetskaia (1909–97)23 and Efim

Etkind (1918–99) held much the same appeal as the LITOs for young
people, as did Dmitrii Maksimov’s (1906–87) famous seminars on Alek-
sandr Blok held at the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University. Many
of these teachers who nurtured the younger generation had spent time in
the Gulag under Stalin, and for the younger generation this experience
further underlined their credentials as independent-minded and un-Soviet,
sometimes even anti-Soviet figures. Thus, although the system of LITOs
200 Emily Lygo
was under the aegis of the Writers’ Union, certain groups became strongly
associated with and influenced by the non-party literary and cultural intel-
ligentsia in Leningrad. When, in the 1950s and 1960s, an official policy in
Leningrad to encourage young people to take up poetry coincided with a
popular interest among young people in learning about the literary culture
of the early decades of the century – especially the poetry of the Silver
Age – from its surviving representatives, poetry achieved unprecedented
popularity.24
The enthusiasm for poetry which, in the 1950s at least, had the blessing
of both the party and the intelligentsia, was fostered by the authorities not
only through their LITOs, but also through officially organized poetry
competitions, conferences for young writers, readings and occasional
opportunities to publish. In 1956 Den’ poezii (Poetry Day) was added to
the calendar of Soviet red-letter days, and the almanacs of the same name
established in Leningrad and Moscow, in which famous poets were pub-
lished alongside their lesser-known counterparts. Together with the
almanac Molodoi Leningrad, it improved provision for publishing,
although this goal was still not easy to achieve.
The biennial conferences of young writers were perhaps the most
accessible of these opportunities outside the LITOs available to most
young writers. Delegates were divided into seminars devoted to the genres
of prose, poetry, drama, science fiction and criticism, and enjoyed the
opportunity to work closely with established writers over three days, and,
potentially, to make an impression on them. At the conclusion of the three
days, the supervisors reported back to the final assembly of participants,
and a poetry reading was held in the evening. In the 1950s there was con-
siderable prestige attached to young writers who participated in the con-
ferences, and especially to those who were recommended to editors by
these conferences.25
The 1956 conference was held shortly after Khrushchev’s Secret
Speech, and it is apparent from the stenographs of speeches that the whole
event was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Thaw: the opening
speaker began the conference by attacking Stalinist Socialist Realism, sug-
gesting that Soviet writers turn to foreign literature for inspiration. In the
final assembly of the conference, the supervisor of the poetry seminar,
Elena Ryvina, spoke at length about a new direction in poetry taken in her
seminar by four young poets, aged between 19 and 25: Gleb Gorbovskii
(b. 1931), Vladimir Britanishkii (b. 1933), Viktor Berlin, and Vladimir
Ufliand (b. 1937):

This is, as it were, a reaction against the huge quantity of poems that
have appeared in the thick and thin journals this year, the large
number of grey poems which often varnish reality, which are out-
wardly patriotic but in essence are mindless and declamatory, which
frequently bear no real weight in their lines; as if in reaction to this, is
 The need for new voices 201
the work of these comrades, each one wishing to comprehend every-
thing happening extremely insightfully and extremely individually.26

Ryvina’s commentary on the work of the four poets was not without
criticism, but the disproportionate amount of time that she devoted to them
– nobody else gave a report of their seminar that was even half as long –
indicates that she thought very highly of them. The poets were praised for
their individuality, interesting subject matter and the quality of their
thought. Ryvina liked poems that addressed contentious issues or problems
in Soviet society: she singled out the poem ‘The Other’ by Britanishkii as
an example, which criticized materialistic civil servants who believed that
their cars shielded them from the common people in the street.27
Of Ryvina’s four poets, Britanishkii and Gorbovskii certainly joined the
Writers’ Union, and Viktor Berlin may have done so. Ryvina’s praise of
these young poets probably helped them to begin the process of making a
career and a name for themselves. Vladimir Ufliand might also have
become a professional poet, had he not been involved in a scandalous
poetry reading in 1968 characterized in the press as a ‘Zionist sabbath’.28
Ufliand’s fate – to suffer at the whim of a malicious and careerist journalist
– was not uncommon. In their time, Aleksandr Kushner (b. 1936), Viktor
Sosnora (b. 1936), Vladimir Britanishkii, and Iosif Brodskii (b. 1940) suf-
fered similar attacks. Brodskii’s chances of a career, like Ufliand’s, were
destroyed by the reputation that he was given by a defamatory article.
The cases of young poets like Kushner, Sosnora and Britanishkii – all of
whom were accepted into the Writers’ Union during or just after the
Thaw, demonstrate that an attack, or unwanted attention from the author-
ities did not preclude the possibility of a professional career. As we know,
in the 1950s the Writers’ Union was eager to accept young poets, and this
aim provided the impetus not only for an intensification of work with
young writers, but also for a revaluation of both the criteria for admission
to the Union, and of the admissions process. It is apparent from
stenographs of meetings of the Board that, during the early 1950s, the
Union dispensed with the kandidat stage of the admissions process,
whereby a young poet was given junior status in the Union for some years
before becoming a fully-fledged member. In 1953, Toropygin and
Novoselov were given the status of kandidat when they applied, but by
1956 the last remaining kandidaty were given full membership, and new
poets were accepted into the Union proper immediately. This meant not
only an increase in membership, but also meant that some poets were
becoming members of the Union at a younger age. When V.N. Kuznetsov
was accepted into the Union in 1956 at the age of 24, his age was given as a
reason in favour of his acceptance: ‘We need to grow younger with the aid
of talented young people’.29
There were also many cases in which writers were accepted into the
Union on the strength of having published only one book. The criteria for
202 Emily Lygo
admissions to the Union seem to have stipulated that an author should
have published two books,30 but in 1958 it was noted at a meeting of the
Committee for Admissions of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union
that, ‘we very often accept writers after a first, and often poor quality
book’.31 Such a concession made it slightly easier to gain admission, and
also meant that writers could apply for admission a little earlier than they
might otherwise have done.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the results of the Thaw policies towards
young writers were discernible for many writers: not only were there hun-
dreds of readings by amateur poets held in the city,32 it was also at this
time that poets who had attended the LITOs of the 1950s began to be
accepted by the Union. Stenographs of meetings of the Board of the
Writers’ Union show that in 1961 Lev Kuklin (b. 1931) became the first
member of the Mining Institute LITO to be admitted to the Union; in
1962 he was joined by Lev Gavrilov (b. 1931) and the following year by
Gleb Gorbovskii and a member of David Dar’s LITO, Viktor Sosnora. At
a Board meeting in 1961 a discussion of the provision for young poets in
the city took place.33 The chairman of the Board enumerated and com-
mented upon the various facets of this provision, and announced that save
for a few isolated instances where there was still room for improvement,
the system of support for young poets in Leningrad was now adequate:

Now we can no longer say that young poets receive little attention –
their poems are published in journals and in newspapers, we hold cre-
ative discussions of their work with them, they perform on the radio,
we give them critical assessments of their work.

As soon as the provision of work with young poets had been acknow-
ledged to be satisfactory, a backlash against the liberalism of the Thaw
materialized in the form of certain writers who spoke out at the meeting
to complain that, in their opinion, young poets received too much atten-
tion. There existed a school of thought among some writers that young
poets had had far too much encouragement and freedom to experiment in
their work, and in particular with form. Sergei Orlov criticized what
he saw as uncontextualized, misguided appropriation of experimental
poets of the 1920s and 1930s: it seems likely that he was hinting at the
interest many post-war poets in Leningrad had in the early poems of
Mayakovsky and Zabolotskii, and the work of Khlebnikov, and the
OBERIU poets.
This body of conservative opinion within the Writers’ Union had not
had much influence over policies during the Thaw which began in 1953,
and especially after 1956, and young writers had consequently benefited
from lenient attitudes towards them, and a supportive system of work with
them. In 1962 and 1963, however, as the politics of the USSR began to
grow conservative again, the Writers’ Union began to retract much of its
 The need for new voices 203
provision for young writers. As early as January 1962, the Board of the
Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union met to discuss the question of the
ideological work and tasks of writers, and the father figure of Soviet
Leningrad poetry, Aleksandr Prokof’ev, complained about certain young
poets who had no social conscience, and desired only scandalous success.34
Sergei Orlov complained at the same meeting that he felt quite alienated
by the public’s taste in poetry: at a reading in the city he was surprised by
an audience’s enthusiasm for poetry in which he saw no merit.
In 1963 it became more difficult to organize readings for young poets,
and control over the content of such events was tightened: it was decided
that Anatoly Chepurov of the metodsovet (methodological council) should
vet the contents of every public reading that the Union organized before it
took place and, a few months later, a decision was taken ‘about the
increase in control over the programmes of literary evenings in the city’.35
At the same meeting a similar decision was taken to gather the leaders of
all literary groups in the city together, in order to give them ‘guidance’ in
their work, and to allot to each literary circle and LITO a group of writers
selected from the Board who would support the running of the group: ‘to
help them and to control them’.
At meetings such as these in 1962 and 1963, Orlov, Prokof’ev and other
politically orthodox writers of the older generation who occupied the
central positions in the Writers’ Union spoke out against what they con-
sidered to be the ‘excesses’ of many young, liberal poets. It seems likely
that they felt empowered by the evident shift towards conservatism in
central politics, and they quickly became a force for reactionary policies.
Over the coming years more measures of control would be taken, and
opportunities for unknown poets to publish, or to attend conferences
would begin to diminish. This tendency was, of course, reflected in the
politics of the capital too: after the initial honeymoon period following the
publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich (Odin den’ Ivana
Denisovicha) – probably the most important event of the 1962–63 Thaw –
criticism of the work began to appear as early as January 1963,36 and even
the poet Evgenii Evtushenko, who was often criticized by liberals for
his willingness to compromise with the authorities, was banned from
travelling abroad in 1963 after the tamizdat publication of A Precocious
Autobiography.37
We can see how policies towards young writers were in a state of flux by
1963 if we examine the fates of two young writers who were trying to make
careers for themselves at that time: Viktor Sosnora and Iosif Brodskii.
From stenographs of meetings of the Writers’ Union it is clear that Brod-
skii and Sosnora were the two most contentious figures among young
writers who emerged during the Thaw – their cases prompted the most
fierce and involved discussions, and divided the Union into staunch sup-
porters and opponents, probably in part due to the fact that they were two
of the most talented poets to appear in Leningrad in the early 1960s.
204 Emily Lygo
When Sosnora appeared in about 1960, his career was supported in
Moscow by Nikolai Aseev and Lili Brik – two very powerful figures in
Soviet literary circles. Sosnora’s work was apparently recommended to
Aseev by Boris Slutskii, who had seen his poems in manuscript (samizdat)
form, after which Aseev took it upon himself to help the young poet.38
Aseev enlisted support in Leningrad for his protégé from D.S. Likhachev,
one of the most influential figures in the Leningrad literary intelligentsia at
the time, and Likhachev sponsored Sosnora’s application to the Union in
1963.39 When the application was discussed by the Board of the Leningrad
Branch of the Writers’ Union, however, it became clear that several
members were opposed to Sosnora being accepted. As reason why
Sosnora should not be admitted, this opposition argued that some pas-
sages in his work were highly inappropriate, and even insulting to Soviet
citizens, for example the line in his long poem Horsemen:40

– You, Russians,
you – cowards,
Sons of dogs!

Another problem was a comparison in one poem between workers on

their way to factories and black, scuttling crabs. The debate about
Sosnora’s application eventually boiled down to a choice between two
options: to accept him into the ranks of the Union where he could be
helped and guided by older and more experienced poets, or to leave him
out in the cold. The liberal pedagogically inclined members of the Union
prevailed, and Sosnora was accepted.41
By 1963, Iosif Brodskii was also beginning to make a career for himself:
he had a budding reputation as a translator, and possessed a contract to
produce a volume of translation for a Moscow publisher.42 The develop-
ment of his career was interrupted by the now infamous article ‘A Drone
on the Literary Periphery’ which appeared in Vechernii Leningrad at the
end of 1963.43 The article slandered Brodskii as a parasite on society, and
the young poet and translator was put on trial at the beginning of 1964 on
this charge.44 In itself, this was not uncommon for unofficial writers at this
time – Aronzon and Kuz’minskii are among other writers who also stood
trial but were acquitted – in Brodskii’s case, however, the trial received a
much higher public profile.
The Writers’ Union was split over the attitude that it should adopt
towards Brodskii. After the fiasco of the trial and Brodskii’s internal exile,
many writers were very angry that the Union had made no attempt to
negotiate with Brodskii, or to help him. In a meeting at the end of 1964,
David Dar spoke out about this issue.45 Dar claimed that meetings at
which the course of action was discussed had been closed, and no writer
who supported Brodskii had been given any say in the Union’s policy. He
highlighted how members of the translation section and others who spoke
 The need for new voices 205
out in defence of Brodskii at his trial were strongly criticized by the Union,
which insisted that the writers should have toed the party line over the
issue. Dar recalled that he had suggested, even before the article appeared
in the press, that the Union invite Brodskii to come and talk to them, so
that they might find out more about him and what he was thinking.
Nothing was done about his suggestion. Some time later, Dar reiterated
his point, but he was ignored again, and so, he said, the Union allowed
itself to ‘let this person’s head roll’. After the article appeared, Dar
explained, he had still wanted to reconcile the Union and Brodskii,
but this was categorically forbidden by the then chairman of the Union
Daniil Granin, and the whole affair developed into a catastrophe. In
Brodskii’s case, then, the conservatives in the Union and not the liberals
prevailed.
The case studies of Sosnora and Brodskii demonstrate clearly how
crucial the policy of the Writers’ Union was in determining the fates of
young writers, for the critical difference between these stories of success
and failure is the difference in attitude of the Writers’ Union. While,
during the Thaw, the prevailing mood was liberal and encouraging
towards young writers, and especially towards young poets, the Union
held the view that it was better to bring erring writers into the fold and
help them, than alienate them and leave them to the mercy of the political
authorities. As official policy grew more conservative, there were more
and more instances when the Union declined to intervene in troubled lit-
erary careers and, gradually, only the more politically compliant and,
often, artistically mediocre, found success in their applications for admis-
sion to the Union.
The decisions to support Sosnora but not Brodskii also appear to be
early indications of a tendency, which would later develop into a policy for
the Writers’ Union, to take an interest in only those young poets who had
already made some progress in their careers. In the 1950s, the system of
LITOs, readings, competitions and conferences had been open to poets
with no experience or publications, like Ufliand, Gorbovskii, Britanishkii
and Berlin who received special attention at the 1956 conference; by 1964,
however, the Union had restructured its work with young writers, so that it
ran only the seven largest LITOs in the city which proficient and more
experienced poets attended.46 In a few years time, it would express interest
almost exclusively in poets who had attended LITOs for several years, and
would pay virtually no attention to new and unknown faces on the literary
scene.47 The generation of poets who appeared in the 1950s LITOs were
assimilated so slowly into the Union – over a period of more than ten
years – that even in the first half of the 1970s, most poets admitted to the
Union had been born between 1935 and 1940 and had appeared on the lit-
erary scene in the 1950s. Poets who were born after 1940 – and Brodskii
was born in 1940 – found it much more difficult to gain a foothold in the
literary establishment.
206 Emily Lygo
As the Union’s policy towards young writers grew more conservative,
once again the intelligentsia became alienated from the official, Soviet
culture, as it had been prior to the Thaw. The precarious constellation of
power and influence in society under Khrushchev was a short-lived period
of reconciliation of the political and cultural authorities in society; while it
lasted, it engendered and supported a flourishing of official lyric poetry.
The non-party intelligentsia was sidelined, however, by decisions the
Union took towards the end of the Thaw to increase political control over
literary activities in the city.
After Brodskii’s trial, members of the translation department and other
supporters of Brodskii were dealt with harshly, in some cases being pro-
hibited from working with young writers.48 As a result of these changes,
the atmosphere in the LITOs and at readings in the city was not nearly as
free as it had been. The attitudes of young writers changed towards these
institutions: many no longer viewed the Union as a career prospect, but,
instead, orientated their literary efforts towards an audience they could
reach through samizdat and later through tamizdat, and at underground,
unofficial readings. Gleb Semenov and others continued to run LITOs and
provide young poets with creative forums for work, but the scarce
opportunities to read in public or to publish discouraged young people
from trying to pursue an official career. Important relationships continued
to exist between young poets in the city and the older generations of the
intelligentsia, but often these no longer formed part of the Union’s work
with young writers. Instead, such relationships between young poets and
their older mentors became a private, literary support system which con-
stituted an alternative to the Writers’ Union.

Notes
1 See H. Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR 1946–59, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962, pp. 83–142.
2 M. Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature. Writers and Problems 1917–1967, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 315–17; O. Carlisle, Poets on Street
Corners, New York: Random House, 1968, pp. 2–6; V. Shlapentokh, Soviet
Intellectuals and Political Power. The Post-Stalin Era, London: I.B. Tauris &
Co. Ltd, 1990, pp. 112–13.
3 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/468.
4 D. Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1978, p. 141.
5 A. Genis, P. Vail’, 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988.
6 The Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union, which had limited self-governance,
was established by Khrushchev in 1955 to appease liberals. See: J. Garrard, C.
Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1990, p.
79.
7 This is evident in an anthology of unpublished poetry: K. Kuz’minskii, G.
Koval’ev, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, Newtonville,
Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986.
8 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power, p. 112.
 The need for new voices 207
9 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, p. 106.
10 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/194-95. This discussion is referred to in the chronology of
Soviet literature found in Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, Moscow:
Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1987, p. 399.
11 Ryvina ran the LITO at the Forestry Engineering Institute in Leningrad in the
early 1950s.
12 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/194-95.
13 On the apathy of the younger generation, see A. Gaev, ‘The Decade Since
Stalin’, in M. Hayward and E. Crowley, Soviet Literature in the Sixties. An Inter-
national Symposium, London: Methuen, 1965, pp. 18–54, here p. 28; and M.
Bryld, E. Kulavig (eds), Soviet Civilisation Between Past and Present, Odense:
Odense University Press, 1998, p. 87. c.f. chapter by Juliane Fürst in this
volume.
14 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/216.
15 See in particular the sections published regularly in Neva entitled ‘Molodye
golosa’.
16 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/244.
17 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/186.
18 V. Britanishkii, ‘Stat’i i materialy’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 14, 1995,
167–80. Britanishkii is a professional geologist and poet, and member of the
Writers’ Union. He was a student in the Mining Institute LITO during the
1950s.
19 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/245.
20 There were fewer opportunities to publish in Leningrad than in Moscow for
both young and mature writers: Moscow’s Novyi mir was the flagship of the
Thaw for mature writers, and Molodaia gvardiia became the equivalent for
young writers. In the late 1950s and 1960s the possibility of establishing a filial
of Molodaia gvardiia in Leningrad was raised at many meetings of the Writers’
Union, but the idea did not come to fruition.
21 In the history of Leningrad poetry in this period, it is impossible to ignore the
influence of the poet and pedagogue Gleb Semenov. He began teaching poetry
to groups of young people before the war, when he was a teacher at the chil-
dren’s poetry club of the Pioneer Palace. In 1954, he was appointed referent, or
seminar leader, of the Writers’ Union Committee for Work with Young
Writers in Leningrad, and he used this position to influence the shape of policy
towards young writers; his promotion to this position and his resulting influence
over Union policy towards young writers is a good example of the increase in
power of the non-party intelligentsia during the Thaw. He wanted the LITO
system, which existed to provide a career structure leading young writers even-
tually to admission to the Writers’ Union, to foster a creative atmosphere
where young poets could enjoy a considerable degree of artistic freedom, as
well as find opportunities to develop their careers. A whole generation of post-
war poets in St Petersburg developed under his tutelage: Tat’iana Galushko,
Leonid Ageev, Aleksandr Kushner, Vladimir Britanishkii, Nina Koroleva,
Oleg Tarutin, Aleksandr Gorodnitskii and Nonna Slepakova, to name but a
few.
22 E. Kumpan, ‘Nashi Stariki’ in Istoriia Leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury:
1950–1980-e gody, St Petersburg: DEAN, 2000, pp. 29–38, here p. 29.
23 For more information on Linetskaia, see: M. Iasnov (ed.), El’ga L’vovna Linet-
skaia. Materialy k biografi i. Iz literaturnogo naslediia , St Petersburg: Sympo-
sium, 1999.
24 The young writers’ desire to learn more about their grandparents’ generation
has been attributed to a need to pick up the threads of literary tradition which
208 Emily Lygo
had been severed by both the censorship and purges of the Stalinist period.
See, for example, Kumpan, ‘Nashi stariki’.
25 Such conferences are described in: D. Shraer-Petrov, Druz’ia i teni, New York:
Liberty Publishing House, 1989, and information about them is also found in
the Writers’ Union archives.
26 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/299.
27 The poem was first published in M. Borisova, ed., To vremia – eti golosa.
Leningrad. Poety o ‘ ttepeli , Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990, p. 81.
28 Ufliand asserts that until this disastrous evening he had entertained the idea
that he might manage to publish and eventually join the Writers’ Union. After
the furore which followed the evening he realized that this was impossible.
Vladimir Ufliand, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 26 May
2003. See also: V. Ufliand, ‘Odin iz vitkov istorii literaturnoi kultury (Nekotorie
osobennosti nezavisimoi piterskoi poezii v sootnosenii s sobstvennym
opytom)’, Petropol’, no. 3, 1991, 108–15.
29 ‘Protokoly i stenogrammy zasedanii Pravleniya 1956’, TsGALI SPb, 371/1/267.
30 S. Massie (ed.), The Living Mirror. Five Poets from Leningrad, London: Victor
Gollancz Ltd, 1972, p. 29.
31 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/374.
32 Aleksandr Kushner remembers that he participated in poetry readings as often
as once a week during the height of their popularity during the Thaw. Alek-
sandr Kushner, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 7 November
2002.
33 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/418.
34 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/440.
35 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/464.
36 B. Rubin, ‘Highlights of the 1962–1963 Thaw’ in Hayward, Crowley, Soviet
Literature in the Sixties, pp. 81–99, here p. 93.
37 E. Evtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, London: Collins and Harvill
Press, 1963.
38 Viktor Sosnora, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 21 May
2003.
39 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463.
40 Originally published in 1969, and republished as V. Sosnora, Vsadniki, St
Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 2003.
41 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463.
42 Y. Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’, Neva, no. 2, 1989, 134–66, here 146.
43 Lerner, ‘Okolo-literaturnyi truten’’, Vechernyi Leningrad, 29 November 1963.
44 For details of Brodskii’s case see Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’.
45 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.
46 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.
47 A decision was taken in 1973 to allow ‘only writers who have already written
something interesting to take part [in the conference of young writers]’,
TsGALI SPb, 371/1/621.
48 These punishments meted out to translators are alluded to in the stenograph of
the meeting of the Board of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union on 19
March 1964: TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.
11 Modernizing Socialist Realism in
the Khrushchev Thaw
The struggle for a ‘Contemporary
Style’ in Soviet art
Susan E. Reid

In summer 1958, aesthetician Nina Dmitrieva published an essay ‘On the

Question of the Contemporary Style’ in the relatively liberal art journal of
the USSR Artists’ Union, Tvorchestvo.1 The Contemporary Style (sovre-
mennyi stil’) as she presented it was a new period style embracing all
aspects of Soviet culture and embodying the spirit of the present age. Not
only in its iconography but, most significantly, in its formal structures,
it would express the vast transformations that had taken place in the
Soviet Union since the Revolution and the rapid pace of progress in the
present. A contemporary artist must have a heightened awareness of these
momentous changes, and this would inevitably find expression precisely in
stylistic change. The hallmarks of the Contemporary Style according to
Dmitrieva and others were generalization, lapidariness, expression and
monumentality.
Dmitrieva’s essay was a manifesto of artistic reformism, bringing
together some of the key concerns and criteria that had emerged within
the official art establishment since Stalin’s death.2 Attempts to define and
promote the Contemporary Style were countered by rearguard efforts to
discredit it or to contain the revision of Socialist Realism and of the
‘usable past’ it implied within controllable limits.3 For the art world, no
less than other ideological and cultural institutions in the Thaw, was split
between reformists and conservatives of various stripe and degree. What
was at stake in this seemingly arcane and inconsequential discussion of
style? Why did it arouse such passions?
This chapter will examine the battle lines marked out by the terms
sovremennyi (contemporary or modern) and stil’ (style), focusing on
reformist painting and criticism in the Moscow art establishment, espe-
cially the Moscow Artists’ Union, MOSKh, the hub from which intra-sys-
temic pressures for artistic de-Stalinization emanated. Our discussion will
turn, as quarrels between these Soviet Ancients and Moderns did, on a
cluster of highly charged terms – modernity, progress, youth, realism, and,
of course, style – over whose definition the forces for and against de-
Stalinization, modernization and internationalism were fought out in the
official art world of the Khrushchev Thaw.
210 Susan E. Reid
Ancients and Moderns
To promote the ‘contemporary’ in art and to rehabilitate discussion of
artistic form constituted one front in the widespread social and political
battle over past, present and future that marked the Thaw, a battle that
was coded in the official Soviet press as the struggle between ‘innovation
and tradition’.4 For art world reformists it was not simply a choice between
tradition or innovation, but a question of which tradition – or rather tradi-
tions – should serve as the basis for new developments that would put Stal-
inism behind them. This constituted a challenge to those artists and critics
who, in the course of the Stalin period had accrued the personal and insti-
tutional power to define realism in terms of their own practice and of its
prototype, the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) of the nineteenth century. The
confrontation between (to use Stephen Cohen’s phrase) the ‘friends and
foes of change’ in the art system was fought out over the question of a
liberal or dogmatic conception of realism.5 Must realism be based solely
on nineteenth-century Russian sources, and founded in cultural autarky?
Or might it embrace international, twentieth-century models? Foreshad-
owing French revisionist Roger Garaudy’s 1963 formulation of a syncretic
‘Realism without Bounds’,6 blacklisted in the Soviet Union, the discussion
of the Contemporary Style was fundamentally about the modernization of
Soviet art and its opening up to international influence. At issue was the
legitimacy of selectively assimilating modernism – Russian, Western and
increasingly also post-colonial – which for so long had been anathematized
as formalist decadence, into a modern, civic, socialist art; and the question
of whether this art could be considered ‘realism’.
Even before Stalin’s death in 1953, art critics had begun to express a
sense that realism as currently practised was no longer adequate to reality
or effective on the public. Exhibitions were dominated by a powerful
gerontocracy peddling ‘applause painting’ that promoted the Stalin cult,
lakirovka (art that ‘varnished’ or embellished reality), and trivial genre
painting lacking dramatic conflict. Clichés and dogma had got in the way
of any genuine, sincere artistic response to life. In the struggle against for-
malism, form itself had been neglected. As a result, some warned, art was
losing its audience; it no longer had the power to move, or even to matter.7
Artistic renewal was urgent, and this required attention to the means of
art. It was time ‘to introduce concepts of form into the very technology of
our business’.8
For reformists the nadir of what they denigrated as ‘naturalism’, as
opposed to ‘true’ realism, was marked by the meticulously descriptive illu-
sionism of Aleksandr Laktionov, such as his Moving into the New Apart-
ment, 1952 (Figure 11.1). A broad spectrum of artists and critics was
united in hostility towards Laktionov’s ‘striking unartisticness’ and ‘primi-
tive illustrativeness’.9 His work was culpable of lakirovka in two mutually
reinforcing senses. This pejorative referred at once to the rose-tinted view
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 211

Figure 11.1 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving into the New Apartment, 1952.

of reality and to the varnish-smooth, quasi-photographic surface. Effacing

the sense of the materiality of paint applied to a flat surface by a human
hand, it aspired to give the illusion that this embellished world was an
unmediated presence, or ‘reality in the forms of reality itself’, rather than a
representation in the forms and conventions of art.10
Two complementary reformist agendas met in the discussion of the
contemporary during the Thaw. It was, on one hand, about consigning
Stalinism, including its artistic dogmas, hierarchies and practices, to the
212 Susan E. Reid
past. It was also about embracing present and future: acknowledging the
rapid course of modernization the Soviet Union had undergone in the
process of intensive industrialization, urbanization and scientific and
technological revolution. As Katerina Clark has argued:

[M]uch of the 1956 ‘protest’ was not ultimately about ‘Stalinism’ per
se. It was rather the sort of stock-taking that was bound to occur when
the Soviet Union came of age as a modern society. The coming-of-age
had occurred in the late thirties, but the stock-taking had largely been
kept out of print hitherto. Now it could be made public.11

Efforts to define and contest the Contemporary Style were a vital con-
tribution to this overdue stock-taking about the specific nature of Soviet
modernity and its appropriate cultural expression. The discussion of style
was, furthermore, motivated by a concern for professional status and auto-
nomy: to gain recognition for art and its analysis as a specialist field with
its own specific tools and expertise. It was associated with the revival of
the discipline of aesthetics that took place in this period. Informed by a
cautious and largely unacknowledged re-examination of Russian Formalist
as well as Western theories, in addition to rereading of Marx, theorists
began tentatively to explore once again such fundamental aesthetic cat-
egories as beauty; the aesthetic nature of art and its difference from life;
and of course, style.12

Modernism, realism and the Two Camps

The discourse of contemporaneity, like other ways of knowing and catego-
rizing the world in the 1950s, was shaped by the binary structures of the
Cold War.13 The world was pictured as divided into ‘Two Camps’ perman-
ently pitted against each other in ideological battle. To the antithetical
world systems of capitalist imperialism and socialism corresponded two
absolutely irreconcilable, aesthetic ideologies: modernism and realism.
From the orthodox Soviet perspective, modernism, as the instrument of
global capitalism, was decadent, individualistic, anti-rational and anti-
humanist.14 Although, according to the doctrine of Peaceful Coexistence,
the threat of armed conflict had receded, ideological hostility continued.
Realism and modernism remained irreconcilable. Indeed, according to
orthodoxy, vigilance was all the more necessary. As President of the
Moscow Artists’ Union board Dmitrii Shmarinov declared in late 1958,
‘Contemporaneity, now as never before in history, is antagonistic and both
sides possess quite different means of expressing their own ideology’.15 To
reject realism and espouse modernism was to betray socialism. Even to
question the absolute antithesis and propose some syncretic ‘third way’ in
art was heretically to will the convergence with capitalism. The spectre of
international Marxist revisionism, of the uncoupling of socialism and
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 213
realism, and of the unholy reconciliation with modernism had already arisen
uncomfortably close to home, in parts of socialist Central and Eastern
Europe as well as in the developing countries over which the Soviet Union
was anxious to establish cultural and ideological dominion.16 It loomed large
over the Soviet domestic discussion of the Contemporary Style.
‘Some jealous guardians of tradition say Western form is incomprehen-
sible to the masses’, art historian German Nedoshivin noted at a debate in
the Institute of Art History in April 1960. But, he argued, this was belied
by the success that recent exhibitions from the fraternal countries, often
presenting unfamiliar, modern forms, had enjoyed with the Soviet public.17
Soviet anathema since the 1930s had firmly identified such departures
from naturalism as flattened pictorial space, heightened colour, and
expressive deformation with capitalist decadence and anti-realism. But
why should the achievements of modern art be relinquished uncondition-
ally to capitalism? Why should not Soviet artists also have access to
twentieth-century expressive pictorial means? They could, indeed must,
reappropriate them and put them to serve the expression of ‘socialist
humanism’.18

The importance of being ‘contemporary’

Why the imperative to be ‘contemporary’? What was invested in this
epithet? What meanings and values did it convey in Soviet art discourse of
the 1950s? ‘Contemporary’, like ‘socialist’ or ‘realist’, was an honorific; it
indexed a valorized quality but its specific content was contested between
different forces in the art establishment as part of the wider struggle
between reformism and conservatism. Appropriating the label
‘contemporary’ for their agenda, the reformers challenged the status quo
of the art system established under Stalin.
‘Contemporary’ is defined in the 1960 edition of S.I. Ozhegov’s Diction-
ary of the Russian Language as ‘pertaining to the present time, present-
day’, and as ‘standing on the level of one’s own age, not backward
[otstalyi]’.19 ‘Contemporaneity’ was, in part, about becoming conscious of,
and publicly articulating the specificity of present day life; it was about
finding a form for the experience of modernity, just as modernism had
been. As Ozhegov indicates, ‘contemporary’ is the antonym of passé or
outdated. To be contemporary was to be on the side of the future, which
meant, from a party-minded perspective, of communism. Conversely,
whatever the ‘contemporary’ defines itself against is implicitly delegiti-
mated, deprived of any place either in the present or in the trajectory to
the future.
In the reformist discourse of the Thaw ‘contemporary’ was code for
opposition to dogma, to the atrophied forms and sclerotic cultural institu-
tions that were Stalinism’s legacy. For many of the Moscow intelligentsia,
at least, the term had immediate associations with the Sovremennik
214 Susan E. Reid
(Contemporary) Theatre of Oleg Efremov. Opened in 1956, this theatre
was directly identified with the de-Stalinization launched by the Secret
Speech that year. It was set up as a ‘studio of young actors’ nominally affil-
iated to the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) but adopting a consciously
critical relation to it. It set out to challenge MKhAT’s complacency and
entrenched practices and repertoires with new blood and experimenta-
tion.20 Representing a commitment to both the ‘truth of life’ (introducing a
new critical element into the ‘reflection of reality’) and ‘truth of art’ (a
new attention to the specificity of the theatrical medium), the Sovremen-
nik became a flagship of efforts to rejuvenate Soviet culture.
The modernizers did not have a monopoly over the ‘contemporary’,
however. As their adversaries never stopped reminding them, to ‘be of
one’s time’ had been the credo of realism since the nineteenth century.21
The principled stance of the radical intelligentsia since the 1830s, it
implied not simply passive verisimilitude but a critical examination of the
present, its institutions and norms, and a commitment to reform, justice
and modernization.22 According to Soviet orthodoxy, the Russian Realist
painters, the Peredvizhniki, shared the radical intelligentsia’s dedication to
cognizing the life of its times with its conflicts and contradictions, to creat-
ing the ‘type’ of the contemporary person, and to arousing anger against
the Tsarist social order.23 Socialist Realism, as established under Stalin,
claimed to continue this commitment but with the vital difference that life
itself, the ‘contemporaneity’ it reflected, had changed: the contradictions
had allegedly disappeared along with the elimination of class oppression.
The Peredvizhniki and their self-styled Soviet heirs, the Association of
Artists of Revolutionary Russia, AKhRR (1922–32), had in the course of
the Stalin period become the dominant stylistic paradigm of Socialist
Realism.24 AKhRR’s credo was to depict revolutionary subject matter in
accessible form. This meant, in practice, to equate realism with familiar
and hence seemingly transparent styles of the past, effectively with the
representational conventions and genre structures of the nineteenth
century. Dogmatically enforced in the late Stalin period, this interpreta-
tion of realism continued to be upheld by conservatives during the Thaw.
From a reformist position, however, it had ossified a style whose referent
and motivation – life – had in the meantime undergone radical moderniza-
tion. Its audience, the Soviet masses, was also transformed: thanks to the
Revolution they now had the benefit of forty years of education and access
to culture behind them.25

Style
Aleksandr Kamenskii, one of the most outspoken reformist art critics,
scathingly summarized his conservative opponents’ position on the rela-
tionship between realism and contemporaneity: ‘art of our times equals
contemporary theme plus the elevation to an unchanging canon of stylistic
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 215
traditions of past centuries’. This ahistorical conception of artistic form, as
if ‘disembodied like a ghost and able to adapt itself to any image’, must,
Kamenskii argued, be replaced by a properly historicized understanding of
artistic style.26
‘Style’ is one of the most fundamental and disputed terms in art history
and aesthetics, as well as having broader anthropological uses. A broad
working definition that seems to correspond to what Dmitrieva was
proposing is ‘the presence of a common formal denominator in the visual
production of a period’.27 Style was ‘the mirror of the epoch’, but this was
not merely a matter of ‘reflecting’ contemporary subject matter to which
conservatives tried to reduce it, but of changing formal devices and con-
ventions. For style was ‘a category of artistic form’.28
Dmitrieva’s intervention ‘On the Question of the Contemporary Style’
was a programmatic attempt to raise the formulation of style to a conscious
project. It theorized a new, historically determined stage of painting, with
its own identifiably modern, even – though this could not be directly stated
– modernist, set of formal characteristics. The momentous transformations
in ‘life itself’ must generate a commensurate revolution in the means of
representation. ‘Does not the pathos of contemporary reality find corre-
sponding stylistic forms?’ Dmitrieva asked.29 Scientific and technological
modernity had rendered the techniques of the past obsolete and brought
about a ‘crisis of representation’.30 The advent of new form, Dmitrieva pro-
claimed, was already to be discerned in contemporary art, in a marked shift
towards ‘publicistic pathos’ and monumental, synthetic images. And yet
‘the question of the artistic style born of these tasks, or even of the trends
in the development of style, is so rarely posed by criticism’.31
Style, to be recognizable as such, was contingent upon difference. But
the Stalinist system had emphasized not difference but unity: first, the
homogeneity of all loyal Soviet artists, beginning with the 1932 party decree
that disbanded literary and artistic groups and laid the institutional basis
for Socialist Realism; and second, the identity of art and life.32 Although
the original definition of the sole ‘method’ for all Soviet arts did not deter-
mine a single style to embody it, the equation of realism with the appar-
ently unmediated ‘reflection of life in the forms of life itself’ became
hegemonic as a result of power structures in the art world.33 A concern with
the specifically aesthetic qualities of artistic representation – that which
made it different from life – was suppressed under Stalin along with the
condemnation of formalism in general and Russian Formalism in particu-
lar.34 Thus the style of Socialist Realism (as opposed to its method) had
received very little theoretical elaboration, for style implied not only dif-
ference between artistic manners or conventions, but also a non-congruity
between art and life. This, according to Stalinist prejudice, was style’s ori-
ginal sin: it was marked as ‘a form of deviation of art from reality’.35
However, style began to acquire broad cultural importance in practice,
not only in the arts but also in other aspects of material culture in the
216 Susan E. Reid
post-war period, growing in the 1950s as the Soviet Union became more
permeable to diverse outside influences. Style, in the broad anthropologi-
cal rather than art–historical sense, began to function as a marker of dif-
ference and a means of self-differentiation between generations, social
strata, and other divisions within Soviet society. The process was most
vividly manifest in the post-war youth subculture of the stiliagi, for whom,
as Elena Zubkova notes, ‘style’ became a symbol of self-expression – a
concept almost prohibited in those times.36
In ‘high’ culture, too, style, became a mechanism of differentiation, dis-
rupting both the supposedly natural and transparent relationship between
art and its object – reality – and also the carefully maintained myth of a
unified ‘public’ with a single consensual taste. The context was a dramatic
expansion in the range of representational devices available to artists and
viewers in the 1950s. Museums opened their storage and selectively put
back on display their collections of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century West European art as well as rehabilitating selected aspects of
early Russian modernism hitherto buried on grounds of formalism or aes-
theticism. Exhibitions from abroad began to arrive in the Soviet Union
under international cultural exchange agreements. The unprecedented
range and diversity of painterly styles with which the Moscow public was
suddenly confronted made style visible and rendered it a matter of elective
identification: artists, viewers and critics could position themselves as
members in particular subcultures of taste and understanding while disso-
ciating themselves from others.37

Artistic rejuvenation
Exposure to diverse international artistic currents not only made style rel-
ative and visible. It also exacerbated the sense among reformers that artis-
tic renewal was urgent. The Soviet Union’s claim to leadership of the
socialist world camp implied artistic leadership too. But when exposed in
the international context – as it increasingly was – it was found wanting.
The first World Fair of the post-war era, Brussels ’58, with which publica-
tion of Dmitrieva’s article on the contemporary style coincided, was a
particularly humiliating experience. The exclusion of Soviet art from the
narrative of ‘modern art’ which the fair’s international art exhibition con-
structed was only averted when the USSR Ministry of Culture agreed to
loan Russian and Western modernist works still condemned for formalism
and buried in museum storage. It was also compelled to accept a highly
selective version of Socialist Realism and its subsumption under an inter-
national category of ‘Neo-Realism’. The term generally referred to recent
engaged Western figurative art, especially by Italian, French and Belgian
Marxists, who used expressionist, cubist and other modernist devices to
critique capitalism. For Soviet orthodoxy, Neo-Realism remained an unac-
ceptable revision of realism. But at Brussels, realism’s potential for
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 217
renewal – the Soviet reformist agenda – seemingly received the ministerial
imprimatur, contrary to the official position back home.38
The Festival of Youth and Students held in Moscow in 1957, an event of
signal importance for de-Stalinization in artistic and popular culture, also
set Soviet art in a less than flattering context – and with greater domestic
impact because it was held on Soviet soil. A young leader of artistic
reform, Moscow painter Pavel Nikonov, recalled his response to the range
of diverse foreign tendencies he encountered for the first time at the festi-
val’s international art exhibition: ‘In the West art was quite different. In
our section everything was dead, some kind of tortured academicism. It
had to be done differently. But how?’39
How to rejuvenate realist painting, how to inject it with renewed rele-
vance and impact on its contemporary audience? As German Nedoshivin
put it, ‘where is the new realistic form?’40 Answers to Nedoshivin’s and
Nikonov’s questions had already begun to appear in two contexts, both of
which injected new blood into the body of Soviet exhibition fare. The first,
of signal importance for the formation of the Contemporary Style but
beyond the scope of this chapter, was that of international exhibitions,
especially those of ‘progressive’ or socialist artists, including the Festival of
Youth and the unprecedented ‘Art of Socialist Countries’ in winter
1958–59.41 The second category, to which we shall now turn, was that of
Moscow ‘youth exhibitions’.

Youth exhibitions
Separate exhibitions for young artists under 36 years old were a significant
new institution of the Thaw, introduced by the Moscow Artists’ Union
during the first wave of anti-dogmatism and de-Stalinization in 1954 with
the support and involvement of the Moscow Komsomol.42 Like the Sovre-
mennik Theatre, youth exhibitions served as a critique of, and alternative
to established, ‘grown-up’ institutions. Pitting their ‘youth’ against the
sclerosis of age, they injected a new sense of dynamic change into artistic
life.
‘Youth’ was one of the most valorized terms in the symbolic system of
the Thaw, cogently embodying the party’s promises of rejuvenation of the
socialist project, of social and scientific progress, and of the imminent
advent of communism. But even as they guaranteed the radiant future,
young people, especially adolescents, also represented a source of anxiety
(as Juliane Fürst explores in this volume). It was not only political resis-
tance that concerned the regime; it was also troubled by the spread of
ideological apathy and even delinquency among young people.43
The measures the party and Komsomol adopted to tackle the social
alienation of the young alternated nurture with mistrust. The integration
of the younger generation was essential to ensure the continuity
and development of the system. This applied also to young artists, whose
218 Susan E. Reid
problems were regularly discussed throughout the Thaw. As a shadow
economy of art and underground artistic circles began to emerge, youth
exhibitions were introduced partly as a means to keep talented young
artists within the fold. Thus they were part of the reformist effort to main-
tain the viability of the state art system by building into it structures for
renewal. These exhibitions provided young artists with rare opportunities
to exhibit and sell their work. Moreover, thanks to the sponsorship of the
Komsomol, preparations for them were often accompanied by paid assign-
ments. These constituted a source of material support for young artists,
who otherwise received little assistance while establishing themselves.44
Youth exhibitions had, by 1958, become a regular event in Moscow’s
artistic calendar, and had acquired a reputation for innovation, contro-
versy and even scandal; they represented the avant-garde of the official art
system. They took place in spite of unremitting hostility towards them
among conservatives in the art world who repeatedly tried to curtail them,
finally succeeding (temporarily) in 1963 in the retrenchment that followed
the ‘Manège Affair’.45 The separation out of youth as a distinct con-
stituency and interest group split the fictional unity of the artistic body.
But for reformist critics the generation gap was to be welcomed rather
than feared; it opened up the possibility of diversity and change. ‘Youth’
as a curatorial category allowed some latitude for experiment and even for
‘mistakes’, whose seriousness could be mitigated by reference to youthful
inexperience and exuberance. They began to look to the youth exhibitions
as benchmarks of innovation, occasions to discern the tender young shoots
of ‘contemporaneity’ that must be nurtured, to identify new names and
new tendencies in art – and to consign others to the past.

The Fourth Moscow Youth Exhibition, 1958

The hallmarks of the new style began to be articulated with increasing
clarity and consistency in discussions of the Fourth Moscow Youth Exhibi-
tion, which opened in June 1958 despite a last-minute rearguard attempt
to obstruct it.46 As Vladimir Kostin, a leader of MOSKh’s liberal wing,
summed up, it demonstrated that ‘[m]any young artists have felt the need
to seek, for the expression of contemporary content, a contemporary
realist form organically connected with it’.47 Young artists, other reviewers
concurred, were united in search of ‘contemporary expressive means,
[seeking] to speak with the viewer in clear, lapidary and generalized lan-
guage’. What they had left behind was ‘dismal, boring descriptiveness, the
simple statement of facts (. . .), trivial didacticism and anecdotalism’.48 In
this discourse, formerly mandatory practices of Socialist Realism, which
had emphasized exhaustive description, psychological portrayal and
narrative, were disadvantageously counterpoised to the ‘contemporary’,
and relegated as hallmarks of an obsolete, ‘passé’ style.
Another antithesis was also in play here: between the verbal and the
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 219
visual/spatial arts. The subordination of painting to a verbal narrative or
script in the Stalinist art system had delegitimated painterliness – an
emphasis on colour and brush mark – and other specifically visual means
of communication that could not easily or fully be translated into verbal
concepts. Thus it had functioned as a means to corral painting’s capacity
for expression, suggestion and multivalence. Reformists identified contem-
poraneity with the liberation of the visual from the literary, the painterly
from the verbal. This insistence on the specificity of the medium, reflecting
the revival of Russian Formalist concerns, constituted an important area
of rapprochement with modernism.49
Dmitrieva formulated her authoritative definition of the Contemporary
Style in the light of the 1958 youth exhibition and, in particular, of one
challenging painting presented there: The Construction of the Kuibyshev
Hydroelectric Station (Figure 11.2) by Nikolai Andronov (born 1929), who
had graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in 1954. Accord-
ing to Andronov, a manuscript version of Dmitrieva’s article on the
Contemporary Style directly discussed his painting.50 Other reformist art
historians such as Aleksei Gastev (son of the purged revolutionary poet)
also hailed Andronov’s painting as the advent of a new style.51 In order to
put flesh on the bones of the Contemporary Style it will be useful to pause
on this painting and its reception.
The Construction of the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station was a large
composition based on material Andronov had gathered on an assignment
to the construction site of a major hydroelectric dam on the Volga. Its
subject matter, the Promethean transformation of nature to produce elec-
tricity, had impeccable ‘contemporary’ credentials in a sense even conserv-
atives could accept. It was a cliché of Khrushchev era public discourse
that, ‘before our eyes the grandiose transformation of the world is taking
place, ordinary people build, and giants of industry conquer the deserts,

Figure 11.2 Nikolai Andronov, Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, 1957.

220 Susan E. Reid
raise thousands of kilometres of virgin land, and discover new elements’.52
But for reformists, the intensive processes of transformation also had
important implications for artistic style. Artists must produce works com-
mensurate with the vast scale of the construction tasks under way and the
stature of the ‘creators of the future, the heroes of our working days’,
works that were intense and monumental in their visual impact.
Kuibyshev depicts a barren, mountainous, industrial landscape. As the
morning mist rises off the strip of pale water in the middle ground, the
angular silhouettes of cranes can be seen at work. All the human action of
the picture is compressed into a shallow register in the foreground,
between the chill, white water and the surface of the canvas. Three figures
stride off purposefully to the right, while another, pressed up against the
picture plane, is cropped by the frame. The workers are not linked by any
narrative motive or exchanges of glances, as was customary in Stalinist
painting, but only by the shared direction of their determined march,
which is underscored by the conspicuous brushstroke, the diagonal strips
of reddish-brown snow and greenish-grey mud underfoot, and by two
heavy trucks. The clumsy, decidedly un-picturesque, utilitarian forms of
the trucks dominate the composition, along with the graceless human
figures. There is no vegetation to soften the severe environment, a cold
light deprives it of any charm of colour and atmosphere, and the paint
application is equally lacking in refinement.
Despite its fundamentally optimistic theme, Andronov’s painting
departed so far from established norms that hardliners wanted it removed
from the show. It was only after a battle within MOSKh that it remained.53
Even for reformers its technique was controversial. The ambivalence of
the reviewer in the newspaper Moskovskaia pravda was typical: ‘For all its
purely professional shortcomings and imperfections, and its occasional
failure to find correct tonal relations, this painting also attracts [one] by its
acute sense of contemporaneity, its pathos of creation’.54 Kostin conceded
that, judged by established norms of ‘good painting’, it was ‘not hard to
see the shortcomings of this piece – mistakes in the drawing of figures and
objects, the rather coarse and heavy form’. However, he went on, ‘at the
same time I know of very few works that convey the severe working days
of our construction sites so strictly, without any ostentation in the treat-
ment of the motif, and without over-sweetness in the manner of paint-
ing’.55 Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, a painter of the older generation, concurred
with Kostin: ‘We will curse this painting for its lack of finish and because it
is coarsely painted’. Yet, he found, it possessed a rhythm that well
expressed the sense of strenuous labour characteristic of the present.56
Critics who welcomed Andronov’s painting consistently invoked ‘life
itself’ as the source and determinant of its style. Gastev praised
Andronov’s painting for ‘authenticity’ and for conveying the life-affirming
rhythm of the contemporary construction site.57 The young critic Liudmila
Bubnova found Andronov’s painting exemplary of a tendency among ‘the
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 221
best young artists’ to ‘speak truthfully and forcefully about life, revealing it
in all its complexity and contradictoriness; the wish to speak not only of
victories and achievements, but also of difficulties’.58
‘Contemporaneity’, as invoked in relation to Andronov’s painting, set
two imperatives: the new severe truthfulness or authenticity noted in the
passages cited above; and a new monumentality. These requisites identi-
fied artistic de-Stalinization with modernization in the sense of a renewed
engagement with modernist form. Andronov’s image demonstratively
flouted the norms of Stalinist painting as hypertrophied in Laktionov: sac-
charine colours, meticulous detail, deep space, contrived compositions,
fluid transitions and immaculate finish. Instead, its awkwardness and
severity, rough facture, abrupt confrontations of tones and hues, and
tough, unbeautiful heroes: all this took on critical, contemporary meaning
through its distance from the lakirovka and clichés of the past, becoming,
by antithesis, the sign of its sincerity, emotional authenticity and observa-
tion of ‘life as it is’.
Even committed reformers equated ‘authenticity’ and ‘contemporane-
ity’ with a fundamental optimism, however ‘severely’ it was expressed.
This does not necessarily indicate, however, that they were insensitive to
the darker complexity present in the work of Andronov and his peers.
Being ‘contemporary’ meant, in part, restoring to realism the critical,
expository role it had played in the past. Andronov later admitted that his
visit to Kuibyshev had aroused in him conflicting emotions concerning the
inexorable forward-march of progress and the means by which it was
achieved. Tensions between the received triumphalism about socialist
industrialization and their own personal encounters with its costs and
effects left their trace on the surface of the young artists’ work.59 It was this
ambiguous experience of Soviet modernity for which Andronov sought
commensurate pictorial form:

At the construction site of Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, where

many prisoners worked, I witnessed the destruction and subsequent
submergence of the ancient Russian town of Stavropol’ on the Volga.
The drama and conflict sought expression in forms unexpected even
for me. I wanted to convey the dramatic character of the whole atmo-
sphere of labour in the means of painterly plasticity.60

Monumentality
The ‘monumentality’ that reformers identified as a hallmark of artistic
contemporaneity was, they claimed, impelled by the experience of Soviet
modernization. Suppressing the ambivalence discussed above, this rhetoric
served to legitimate modernist departures from naturalism such as relative
flatness, expressive intensification of line and colour, and ‘generalization’
or reduction of detail. The scale and grandeur of the transformations going
222 Susan E. Reid
on before the artists’ eyes, the critics argued, combined with the intense
rhythms of contemporary labour, rendered older forms of depiction inade-
quate, including meticulous description, narrative and the exploration of
character development. They generated, instead, synthetic, ‘generalized’
or abstracted forms, and simplified, heightened expressive contrasts. A
young artist, Irina Vorob’eva, recounted her visit to another of the major
hydroelectric construction sites of the era:

I was in Bratsk. I saw the elements of nature, against which backdrop

man appears at first glance like an ant. What would be the result if one
scrupulously depicted the gigantic cliffs, the bottomless pits, the innu-
merable machines and the small human figures? The artist would
accurately convey the external impression, but he would not tell the
truth. The rhythm of our life naturally demands such forms of expres-
sion in art as can convey the magnificent energy of creative labour, the
stormy tempo of this labour, its dynamics.61

Reviewing the 1958 youth exhibition under the indicative headline, ‘In
Search of Acute Contemporary Expression’, Bubnova wrote:

The impetuous tempo of contemporary life, filled with amazing tech-

nical discoveries, demands more dynamic, acute language of art than,
say the nineteenth-century tempo of life. The young clearly sense this
need for a contemporary language of fine art and strive towards ever
more acute, lapidary and monumental treatment.62

According to Bubnova, Andronov had found just ‘that lapidary lan-

guage, that beaten-out, staccato rhythm, with whose help he has conveyed
the severe pathos of the work of the constructors’, and had captured ‘con-
temporaneity’.63
Monumentality was not only opposed to the naturalistic conception of
realism, displacing exhaustive detail or ‘verbosity’ by ‘lapidariness’, pedan-
tic inventories by synthesis. It also rejected another characteristic which
Stalinist Socialist Realism had derived from Peredvizhnik painting: the
exploration of character development and playing out of emotional
responses through dramatic scenarios, depicted gesture and facial expres-
sion. This Gastev and other modernizers now disparagingly dubbed ‘psy-
chologism’ and consigned to the past. Thus Andronov’s major
achievement, for Gastev, was the formation of a non-psychological, monu-
mental type of painting: he treated his figures on an epic scale as social
types rather than individuals, eschewing complex psychological develop-
ment and the narrative on which this depended. Psychological description
and story-telling were no longer the business of art; they had become the
specific preserve of literature and cinema, freeing the visual and spatial
arts to deal with other tasks specific to them.64
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 223
To promote the ‘monumentalization’ of easel painting at the expense of
‘psychologism’ and narrative was not only to reject the nineteenth-century
realist paradigm of easel painting that had been held up since the 1930s as
the foundation of Socialist Realism. It challenged, more broadly, the
authority of the conventions of pictorial representation established in easel
painting since the Renaissance. Here, too, it resumed the process begun by
early modernism but abandoned in the Soviet Union since the 1920s.65

New paradigms to engage the contemporary viewer

The formerly canonized models of realism were designated ‘un-
contemporary’ on a number of counts, not least the mode of spectatorship
they required of the viewer. Their deep illusionistic space, isolated from
the real world by the picture frame, combined with their use of detail and
narrative, required a form of engrossed contemplation through time. Far
from thrusting the viewer into the momentum of contemporary life and
mobilizing her/him into action, they abstracted her/him from life and
induced passivity.66
The most significant historical sources for a contemporary artistic lan-
guage were now located in those currents of Soviet figurative painting of
the 1920s that had earlier challenged the nineteenth-century identification
of realism with verisimilitude and narrative and had continued to explore
the technical and expressive possibilities of pre-war international, figura-
tive modernism. Two artistic tendencies, in particular, were important for
Andronov’s experiment in Kuibyshev and were identified by Dmitrieva
and others as fruitful stylistic models. These were the Society of Easel
Painters, OST, with its post-Cubist, flattened pictorial space, reduction of
detail, and expressionist deformation, especially the work of Aleksandr
Deineka; and the Soviet continuation of the pre-Revolutionary group
Bubnovyi valet (the Knave of Diamonds) who had introduced a Russian
interpretation of Paul Cézanne (exemplified by Petr Konchalovskii).67
The Contemporary Style’s champions did not, however, limit its poten-
tial sources to earlier Russian and Soviet engagements with international
modernism. They also looked directly to foreign models, especially those
with socialist, ‘progressive’ credentials. Liberal novelist Iurii Nagibin pro-
posed that the best examples of the ‘extreme laconicism, simplification,
and immediate expression of the Contemporary Style’ included Pablo
Picasso’s response to the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937), and the
work of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Both artists were communists
who made wide use of modernist devices to address contemporary issues
of power and oppression.68 Such art was represented as a modern, activist
form of realism; far from a passive reflection of reality, it was – in true
Marxist fashion – an exhortation to go out and change it.
Dmitrieva’s conception of the Contemporary Style in terms of ‘general-
ization, lapidariness and expression’, was also inspired by international,
224 Susan E. Reid
leftist art, as well as by the Soviet 1920s. Important models included the
radical expressionist painting and graphic art that opposed the rise of
fascism in Weimar Germany, and their recent revival in East Germany.69
She specifically cited Bertolt Brecht’s ‘alienation technique’ as a means for
goading an audience into critical engagement with the questions raised in
the theatre – and ultimately to an active response in actual life – rather
than of lulling it into a contemplative, aesthetic trance. To be contempor-
ary meant to be realist but emphatically not naturalistic: to be – like
Brecht or Vladimir Maiakovskii – tendentious, militant and capable of
rousing the viewer to thought and action through synthetic, generalized,
laconic and expressive images.70
The search for new paradigms was justified not only by reference to
changes in the reality realism was to ‘reflect’, but also by changes in the
viewer it was to address. It was a legitimating premise of the Contempor-
ary Style that ‘the aesthetic demands of the Soviet people’ had matured
significantly since Socialist Realism’s inception in the 1930s.71 ‘Now it
is not enough to show the viewer something’, Dmitrieva declared. ‘It
is necessary to arouse him to think about the great social problems of
contemporaneity, but . . . as in any genuine art, the path to thought
lies through the emotions’.72 The Contemporary Style’s monumentality,
‘lapidariness, expression and generalization’ were determined by the
need emotionally and intellectually to engage the viewer in an immediate
and effective way. Andronov, for example, was praised for finding ‘a
rhythmic structure for the picture, such that the theme can be read imme-
diately, and what is depicted imprints itself on the memory and takes
effect’.73

A unified style of modernity?

The Contemporary Style’s rapprochement with modernism could hardly
escape the attention of the guardians of orthodoxy. Even to refer to the
‘Cézannist’ tradition was still contentious in 1958, and Andronov’s Kuiby-
shev Hydroelectric Station and its champions were castigated for uncriti-
cally embracing the painterly devices of Bubnovyi valet.74 But the
Contemporary Style also embodied an even more fundamental threat to
the Soviet view of itself and the world. Invoking the party’s claims that an
unprecedented ‘Scientific Technological Revolution’ was under way, some
modernizers proposed that jet travel and space flight, atomic research,
cybernetics and scientific abstractions had transformed the nature of per-
ception, the way the world was cognized.75 Taken to its logical conclusion
the argument could legitimate not only figurative modernism but even
abstraction; indeed it recalled the rhetoric that had underpinned the devel-
opment of non-objective art in the 1910s. Moreover, if the experience of
scientific and technological modernity shared by East and West, socialist
and capitalist camps alike, was the ultimate determinant on cultural forms
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 225
it must surely generate a common ‘contemporary’ or modern style, a
unified period style of the twentieth century.
Whether out of caution or conviction, the reformists usually stopped
short of such radical conclusions. But their conservative opponents made
the heretical corollary of their arguments explicit in order to discredit the
Contemporary Style as ‘a loophole through which the decadent influences
of cosmopolitan modernism can penetrate our art’.76 To prioritize techno-
logical determinism over the fundamental differences in ideology and
social relations under capitalism and socialism threatened to destabilize
the binary structure of the world into two irreconcilable camps.77 But, the
party reaffirmed, ‘in the world there exist two cultures, two ideologies, and
we must join battle on behalf of our ideology which will be the salvation of
all humanity’.78
‘The Problem of Contemporaneity in Art is a Political Problem’, omi-
nously read a headline in the conservative, Russian chauvinist art journal
Khudozhnik.79 Under pressure from China, the CPSU launched an attack
on ideological and cultural ‘revisionism’ in which the Contemporary Style
was implicated. Debates concerning ‘contemporaneity’, ‘innovation’ and
the ‘means of expression’ were denounced in August 1958 as a mask
behind which artistic revisionists promoted an anti-realist, bourgeois
capitalist notion of art quite irreconcilable with Socialist Realism.80 In
December MOSKh’s party section upbraided reformist critics for attempt-
ing to reconcile realism and modernism and, by extension, of willing the
convergence of socialism and capitalism.81 Conservatives also ‘unmasked’
the Contemporary Style’s affinity with dangerous ‘revisionist’ reinterpreta-
tions of Marxist–Leninist aesthetics proposed since the mid-1950s by East
European and Western Marxists.82 They conflated Dmitrieva’s demand for
a modernized artistic language with the modernist notion of the autonomy
of art, currently being proselytized by revisionists in Poland. There, they
alleged, the term ‘contemporary’ referred to ‘pure geometric and non-geo-
metric abstraction, non-figurative structures based on the factor of chance
(i.e. tachisme), and also figurative art operating with broad, extended artis-
tic metaphor’ – in short, to modernism.83

Conclusion
‘The question of style is now especially urgent’, a conservative inter-
vention proclaimed in 1961. ‘The struggle of styles . . . in contemporary art
reflects the struggle of different ideologies.’84 Evidently the reformist aim
to raise questions of style to conscious debate had succeeded at very least
in forcing the agenda, compelling conservatives to engage with matters
they had previously suppressed.
The reformist promotion of a Contemporary Style placed the stylistic
parameters of realism under review, just as the conception of socialism
and the path to it were also subjected to revision in this period. However,
226 Susan E. Reid
it was not, on the whole, a rejection of the commitment to either socialism
or realism, as conservatives charged. Nor was it about abandoning the
civic, mobilizational role and mass address ascribed to art since the
Revolution. The Contemporary Style was, rather, a call for a syncretic
‘realism of a new type – one might say, a militant realism that speaks in the
name of the people’. In order to exploit the full expressive and persuasive
potential of the artistic medium, this new realism was to ‘critically assimi-
late’ forms hitherto identified with modernism.85 A central platform of
artistic de-Stalinization, the discussion of the Contemporary Style
reopened debate about the relations between realism and modernism, art
and reality, art and its audience, over which reformist and conservative
factions would continue to battle through the Brezhnev era until the last
days of the Soviet Union.86

Notes
1 N. Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu o sovremennom stile’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 6, 9–12.
See also the ensuing debate in Tvorchestvo, 1958, nos. 6–12; and 1959, nos. 5,
10, 12.
2 A. Kamenskii, ‘Na blizhnikh i dal’nikh podstupakh’ (1968) in Kamenskii,
Vernisazhi, Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1974, p. 42; Iu. Gerchuk, ‘Iskusstvo
“ottepeli”. 1954–1964’, Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 1996, vol. 8, no. 1, 49–114; Id.,
‘Iskusstvo “ottepeli” v poiskakh stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1991, no. 6, 26–9.
3 For an indicative hostile account, see B.V. Vishniakov, ‘Ob odnoi kontseptsii
iskusstva 1960–1980-kh godov’, Puti tvorchestva i kritika, Moscow: Izobrazitel’-
noe iskusstvo, 1990, p. 15.
4 S. Cohen, ‘The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the
Soviet Union’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet (eds), The Soviet
Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 11–12. Two
major events spanning the main period of artistic de-Stalinization were a debate
in MOSKh dedicated to ‘Innovation and Tradition’ held in December 1955,
reported as ‘Traditsii i novatorstvo’, Iskusstvo, 1956, no. 2, 17–22, and RGANI,
5/36/25/3-10; and a debate in 1962 at which Dmitrieva gave the keynote lecture
on ‘Novatorstvo v iskusstve sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, RGALI, 2465/1/403.
5 Cohen, ‘Friends and Foes’.
6 Garaudy, D’un réalisme sans rivages: Picasso, Saint-John Perse, Kafka , Paris:
Plon, 1963.
7 For example, ‘Povyshat’ ideinyi uroven’, sovershenstvovat’ masterstvo’, Sovet-
skoe iskusstvo, 18 February 1953.
8 A. Dikii, ‘O forme’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 25 March 1953.
9 V. Kostin, ‘Khudozhnik i sovremennost’’, Iskusstvo, 1957, no. 3, 43. See S.
Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’, Journal of Design History, 1997, vol. 10, no.
2, 182–4.
10 N. Dmitrieva, ‘Sorok let nazad’, Tvorchestvo, 1987, no. 11, 22.
11 K. Clark, The Soviet Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 222.
12 On the moribund state of Soviet aesthetics in the postwar period see Iu.
Riurikov, ‘Lichnost’, iskusstvo i nauka’, Voprosy literatury, 1964, no. 2, pp.
45–71. For its revival see J. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR, Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1985; and N. Dmitrieva, O prekrasnom, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1960.
13 K. Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996, p. 7.
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 227
14 For example, V. Kemenov, ‘Aspects of Two Cultures’ (1947), translated in H.
Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968,
pp. 490–6. See also A. Baudin, ‘ “Why Is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?”
Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53’, in T.
Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (eds), Socialist Realism Without Shores, Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 227–56.
15 D. Shmarinov (interview), Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15 December 1958.
16 S. Reid, ‘The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the
Contemporary Style of Painting’, in S. Reid and D. Crowley (eds), Style and
Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe,
Oxford: Berg, 2000, pp. 101–32.
17 RGALI, 2465/1/75/2, 11.
18 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 10; G. Nedoshivin, ‘ “Oshibochnaia kontseptsiia” ’,
Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 5, 14–15.
19 S. Ozhegov, Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 4th edn, Moscow: Gos. izd. inostrannykh i
natsional’nykh slovarei, 1960.
20 A. Smeliansky, The Russian Theatre After Stalin, transl. Patrick Miles, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 16–30.
21 A. Kantor, ‘O sovremennosti v iskusstve’, Iskusstvo, 1960, no. 4, 35–6.
22 For example, the St Petersburg journal Sovremennik (Contemporary), 1836–66,
in which Alexander Pushkin, Vissarion Belinskii, Alexander Herzen, Nikolai
Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Dobroliubov and others were involved.
23 Kantor, ‘O sovremennosti’, pp. 35–6. But compare E. Valkenier, Russian
Realist Art, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977.
24 For detail see Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, chap. 7; and S. Reid, ‘Socialist
Realism in the Stalinist Terror’, Russian Review, 2001, vol. 60, no. 2, 153–84.
25 See A. Kamenskii, ‘Razmyshleniia u poloten sovetskikh khudozhnikov’, Novyi
mir, 1956, no. 7, 190–203.
26 Kamenskii, ‘Na blizhnikh’, p. 37.
27 F. Schwartz, ‘Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wölfflin and Adorno’,
New German Critique, 1998, vol. 75, 4. For an overview see J. Elkins, ‘Style’, in
J. Turner (ed.), The Grove Dictionary of Art, London: Macmilllan, 1996, vol.
29, pp. 876–83.
28 Editorial, ‘Zerkalo epokhi. K diskussii o stile’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 12, 11;
Round table, ‘Cherty sovremennogo stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 10, 9.
29 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9.
30 A. Gastev, ‘Dvizhenie k stiliu’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 July 1960; G. Nisskii,
‘Poiski formy’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 9 April 1960; Iu. Nagibin, ‘Chto
sovremenno?’ Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 December 1960.
31 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9.
32 Conservatives continued to insist on tselostnost’ (integrity, unitary wholeness)
in the 1970s, in face of young artists’ polystylism. M. Makarov, ‘V poiskakh
tselostnosti’, Tvorchestvo, 1976, vol. 8, and the ensuing debate in Tvorchestvo
1976–78.
33 The definition of style and its difference from the ‘method’ of Socialist Realism
had already become the focus of theoretical debate in a discussion of realism
held in the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1957. See V. Prytkov,
‘Metod i stil’’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 12, 16–17; O. Larmin, ‘Chto zhe takoe
stil’’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 10, 40–4; and V. Shcherbina, ‘O khudozhestvennom
raznoobrazii’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 14 October 1958.
34 Russian Formalist criticism emphasized the difference of art from life, the
mediation of artistic transformations, conventions or ‘devices’.
35 Prytkov, ‘Metod’, p. 16; Iurii Gerchuk, interview with the author, Moscow,
1992; B. Vipper, ‘Neskol’ko tezisov k probleme stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1962, no. 9,
228 Susan E. Reid
11–12; Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 11; Dmitrieva, ‘Mezhdu skhodstvom i neskh-
odstvom’, Iskusstvo, 1961, no. 2, 51.
36 E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964, Moscow: Rossiia molodaia,
1993, p. 138. See also L. Brusilovskaia, ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu
“ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2000,
no. 1, 163–74; Reid and Crowley, Style and Socialism; M. Edele, ‘Strange
Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953’,
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 2002, vol. 50, no. 1, 37–61; D. Hebdige,
Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 102.
37 I have developed these ideas further in ‘The Exhibition Art of Socialist Coun-
tries’, 101–32; and ‘In the name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited’,
kritika 2005, vol. 6, no. 4.
38 M. Alpatov, RGALI, 2329/4/880, 881; RGANI, 5/36/49/9-11; L. Sosset, ‘Brus-
sels Shows Fifty Years of Modern Art’, The Studio, 1958, CLVI, no. 786, 65; A.
Morozov, ‘Sovetskoe iskusstvo 60-kh godov i opyt “novogo realizma” ’, Sovet-
skoe iskusstvoznanie, 1989, no. 25, 39–63; and S. Reid ‘Towards a New Socialist
Realism: the Re-Engagement with Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw’, in S.
Reid and R.P. Blakesley (eds), Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dia-
logue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, Northern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 2006, ch. 11. Conservatives accused Dmitrieva and others of
attempting a rapprochement between Socialist Realism and Neo-Realism. D.
Osipov, ‘Oshibochnaia kontseptsiia’, Sovetskaia kul’tura, 16 April 1959.
39 Pavel Nikonov, ‘Nemnogo o sebe’, in Pavel Nikonov, exh. cat., Moscow: Sovet-
skii khudozhnik, 1990, p. 69.
40 RGALI, 2465/1/75/11, 14.
41 N. Zhukov, ‘Iskusstvo i sovremennost’. Razdum’ia na vystavke’, Literaturnaia
gazeta, 17 January 1959.
42 For detail see S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and the Remodernization of Soviet
Art’, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996.
43 W. Lacqueur and George Lichtheim (eds), The Soviet Cultural Scene
1956–1957, London: Atlantic Books, 1958, pp. 202–4; A. Kassof, The Soviet
Youth Program, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965, p. 2;
Zubkova, Obshchestvo, pp. 154–5.
44 RGANI, 5/17/498/35-45. I am indebted to Aleksandr Vatlin and to the British
Academy for enabling pursuit of the question ‘The Komsomol as Patron of
Cultural Innovation’.
45 V. Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pravoi? 1954–1962’ (1982–83), repr. in G. Anisi-
mov, Naedine s sovest’iu, Moscow: Musaget, 2002, p. 209. Youth exhibitions
were resumed in 1966 when the eighth was held. On the ‘Manège Affair’ see P.
Johnson, Khruschev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.
46 M. Khieninson, ‘Vystavka molodykh priblizhaetsia’, Moskovskii khudozhnik,
no. 9, 20 May 1958. It ran from 19 June to 28 July 1958. V. Kostin, ‘Zametki o
molodezhnoi vystavke’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 14, 30 July 1958.
47 RGALI, 2943/1/991/6-7.
48 T. Shatimova, ‘Molodye khudozhniki Moskvy’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 9, 1958.
49 Compare C. Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1965), repr. in F. Frascina and C.
Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, New York:
Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 5–10.
50 Nikolai Andronov, interview with the author, Moscow, 13 November 1994.
Subsequent discussions indicate that Dmitrieva’s readership assumed she had
Andronov’s Kuibyshev in mind. Editorial, ‘Cherty sovremennogo stilia’,
Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 10, 7.
 Modernizing Socialist Realism 229
51 A. Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie? Zaimstvovaniie? Traditsii?’, Moskovskii khudoz-
hnik, no. 15, 15 August 1958.
52 I. Titov, ‘Sovremennost’ – dusha iskusstva’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15
December 1958.
53 Nikolai Andronov, interview with the author, Moscow, 13 November 1994.
54 M. Khieninson, ‘Tvorcheskii otchet’, Moskovskaia pravda, 17 August 1958.
55 RGALI, 2943/1/991/28; and V. Kostin, ‘Zametki o molodezhnoi vystavke’,
Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 14, 30 July 1958, 2.
56 RGALI, 2943/1/991/38.
57 Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie?’
58 L. Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh ostrogo sovremennogo vyrazheniia’, Moskovskii khu-
dozhnik no. 15, 15 August 1958.
59 Compare Pavel Nikonov’s paintings Our Work Days (1959–60, Almaty) and
Geologists (1962, State Tret’iakov Gallery).
60 Nikolai Andronov, in interview with E. Zinger, ‘Dialogi. Dvoinoi portret’,
Tvorchestvo, 1988, no. 8, 4.
61 ‘Govoriat molodye khudozhniki’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 10, 20.
62 Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’.
63 Ibid.
64 Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie?’
65 Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’.
66 See N. Dmitrieva, Izobrazhenie i slovo, Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1962; Dmitrieva,
‘Stankovizm i monumental’nost’’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 1961, no. 1, 1–3; V.
and V. Lebedevy, ‘Novoe v oformlenii obshchestvennykh zdanii’, Iskusstvo,
1962, no. 9, 28–32.
67 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 12; Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’; RGALI, 2943/1/991/6-7;
V. Kostin, ‘Khudozhnik sovremennosti’, Tvorchestvo, 1957, no. 7, 4–9; Kostin,
‘Kto tam’, 207.
68 Iu. Nagibin, ‘Chto sovremenno?’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 December 1960, 4. An
exhibition of Pablo Picasso in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow in 1956, organized
by Il’ia Erenburg, was a formative cultural event. V. Slepian, ‘The Young vs.
the Old’, Problems of Communism, May–June 1962, 56–7; I. Golomshtok,
‘Unofficial Art in the Soviet Union’, in I. Golomshtok and A. Glezer, Soviet
Art in Exile, New York: Random House, 1977, p. 89.
69 M. Damus, Malerei der DDR: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen
Sozialismus, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991, 142. An important discussion on
‘Realism and Modernity’ in East Germany may have influenced her formula-
tion. W. Hütt, ‘Realismus und Modernität. Impulsive Gedanken über ein
notwendiges Thema’, Bildende Kunst, 1956, no. 10, 565.
70 Dmitrieva, ‘ K voprosu’, p. 9. Compare B. Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’, in
Frascina and Harrison, Modern Art, pp. 227–31.
71 ‘Zerkalo epokhi’, pp. 9–11.
72 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9.
73 O. Roitenberg, ‘Molodye khudozhniki Moskvy’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 9, 33.
74 K. Dorokhov, ‘Tendentsioznost’? Uproshchenstvo? Legkomyslie?’, Moskovskii
khudozhnik, no. 18, 30 September 1958; ‘Vstrecha s masterami starshego
pokoleniia’, Moskovskii khudozhnik no. 15, 15 August 1958; V. Prytkov,
‘Zametki o khudozhestvennoi kritike’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 12, 31–2.
75 For example, G. Nisskii, ‘Poiski formy’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 9 April 1960,
4; Gastev, ‘Dvizhenie’; and V. Turbin, Tovarishch vremia i tovarishch iskusstvo,
Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961.
76 D.A. Shmarinov (interview), Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15 December 1958;
Editorial, ‘K novym uspekham sotsialisticheskogo realizma. Na pervom uchred-
itel’nom s’’ezde khudozhnikov Russkoi Federatsii’, Iskusstvo no. 8, 1960, 4–7.
230 Susan E. Reid
77 Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut tezisy doklada N.S. Khrushcheva’, Moskovskii
khudozhnik no. 22, 15 December 1958, 4; V. Ivanov, ‘Sovremennost’ i
khudozhestvennoe novatorstvo’, Kommunist, 1961, no. 6, 53–63. Only on the
pretext of a critique of modernism was an exploration of its relation to the
contemporary style possible in the Soviet press, for example Kantor, ‘O sovre-
mennosti’, pp. 35–42.
78 ‘Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut tezisy doklada N.S. Khrushcheva’, p. 4; Ivanov,
‘Sovremennost’ i khudozhestvennoe novatorstvo’.
79 M. Ovsiannikov, ‘Problema sovremennosti v iskusstve – problema politich-
eskaia’, Khudozhnik 1959, no. 9, 2.
80 V. Skatershchikov, ‘Krestovyi pokhod revizionistov protiv realizma’, Iskusstvo,
1958, no. 8, 5–8; N. Parsadanov, ‘O novatorstve podlinnom i mnimom’, Tvorch-
estvo, 1958, no. 11, 12.
81 ‘Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut’; V. Kemenov, ‘Nekotorye voprosy sviazi iskusstva s
zhizn’iu’, Iskusstvo. 1961, no. 8, 10–14.
82 On revisionism see W.E. Griffith, ‘The Decline and Fall of Revisionism in
Eastern Europe’, in L. Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays on the History of
Marxist Ideas, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 224; V. Kusin, ‘An
Overview of East European Reformism’, Soviet Studies, 1976, vol. 287, no. 3,
338–61.
83 ‘Zadachi khudozhestvennoi kritiki’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 12, 2; Ovsiannikov,
‘Problema’, p. 2.
84 T. Napolova, ‘Stil’, manera, original’nost’, Zvezda, 1961, no. 1, 185–92.
85 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9.
86 On ‘realism as an open system’ see A. Metchenko, ‘Sotsialisticheskii realizm:
rasshiriaiushchiesia vozmozhnosti i teoreticheskie spory’, Oktiabr’, 1976, no. 4,
182–3.
12 ‘Russia is reading us once more’
The rehabilitation of poetry,
1953–64
Katharine Hodgson

The poetry that was published in the post-war years of the Stalin period
tested its readers’ commitment almost to destruction, presenting them
with numerous turgid epics containing ritualized panegyric to Stalin, but
precious little that was original or individual. Poets, meanwhile, were
faced with the choice either of making their work acceptable to the censor,
or setting it aside until times changed. Critical articles of the early 1950s
lamented the dearth of good poetry; it was only after Stalin’s death in 1953
that it was possible to begin to discuss just why this had been the case, and
how it could be remedied. Well-known poets such as Nikolai Aseev, Il’ia
Sel’vinskii, and Ol’ga Berggol’ts all published articles in the mid-1950s
which drew attention to the shortcomings of contemporary poetry and
argued for the poet’s right to focus on personal and private themes.1
Efforts were made to revive readers’ interest by inaugurating an annual
Poetry Day in Moscow in 1955, when poets gave readings of their recent
work; this quickly became a tradition in major cities across the Soviet
Union, and annual almanacs containing new or newly published poetry as
well as critical articles, began to appear in connection with Poetry Day.2
Such successful innovations were a potential threat to establishment poets
who, as John and Carol Garrard put it, ‘made handsome careers from
rhyming Pravda editorials and celebrating Soviet triumphs with occasional
odes’.3 The appearance of poetry which declared a confident awareness of
its own value as poetry, rather than a means for transmitting current party
policy, threatened to expose the restricted and impoverished nature of
such establishment figures’ work. It promoted a new agenda for poetry:
the rehabilitation of a genre which had been gravely damaged by the
Stalin era.
Establishment figures met this threat to their comfortable status with
virulent critical attacks on their rivals. While the public responded eagerly
to a new generation of young poets born in the 1930s, such as Bella
Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesenskii and Evgenii Evtushenko, who gave
readings to large and enthusiastic crowds, their official reception was
mixed, reflecting the increasingly apparent division of the Writers’ Union
into conservative and liberal wings. The early 1960s saw a series of
232 Katharine Hodgson
campaigns headed by conservative writers and critics such as Vladimir
Ermilov and Nikolai Gribachev against figures including Evtushenko and
Aleksandr Tvardovskii, poet and editor of the liberal journal Novyi mir, to
which the liberals responded both in critical articles defending young
authors, and in concerted efforts to elect their own supporters to influ-
ential positions within the Writers’ Union.4 The struggles among writers
ebbed and flowed in tandem with the political line emanating from
Khrushchev, who intervened on a number of occasions, either to lecture
writers on their proper responsibilities, as he did at meetings between
Party leaders and writers in December 1962 and March 1963, or, when it
suited his purposes, to sanction the publication of controversial works such
as Evtushenko’s poem ‘Stalin’s Heirs’, which helped to promote his policy
of de-Stalinization.5
Poets, however, had their own de-Stalinizing agenda. By writing and
publishing work which upheld poetry’s integrity and independence, poets
set about reclaiming the territory which had been lost by lyric poetry: the
intimate and domestic world of personal emotion and experience, the con-
templation of nature, philosophical reflections on life and on poetry itself.
Poems on Stalin and the Terror did appear occasionally in the early 1960s:
Tvardovskii’s long narrative poem Distance Beyond Distance,
Evtushenko’s Stalin’s Heirs, and short poems about Stalin by Boris Slut-
skii.6 In general, however, censorship restrictions meant that work which
addressed the legacy of the Terror, and difficult questions of individual
guilt and complicity, remained largely unpublished or circulated anony-
mously in manuscript form. Where prose could adopt a tactic of narrative
based around description without apparent authorial comment, as
Solzhenitsyn did in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which
appeared with Khrushchev’s blessing in 1962, poetry, with its renewed
lyrical focus, did not lend itself so easily to displays of objectivity. Bland
narrative verse which mixed superficial description with careful authorial
interpretation had been a staple of Stalin-era literature. In condemning
the Terror, poets tended towards the use of striking metaphor and imagery
which was subjective and evocative; their work was often too outspoken to
be published.
Nevertheless, there was one aspect of the recent past which featured
strongly in published poetry of the Thaw period: the war of 1941–45. This
can be seen as being broadly in line with the official de-Stalinization
agenda. In his 1956 speech at the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev high-
lighted Stalin’s errors which led to the disaster of June 1941, and stated
that Stalin had appropriated credit for the victory, which properly
belonged to the people.7 Poets had already begun to publish work which
revised ritualized heroic representations of the war, placing an emphasis
on the reality of wartime suffering and sacrifice. In one sense this
represented a return to efforts made by poets during the war years to
break with the conventions of Socialist Realist heroics; now, with the
 The rehabilitation of poetry 233
benefit of hindsight, they could also reflect on the peculiar status of the
war as a brief period of relative freedom and honesty, acknowledging the
repression and Terror which both preceded and followed it. Younger
poets remembered their wartime childhoods; this essay, however, will
focus on poets born a decade or so earlier, many of whom had been
directly involved in the war.
These older poets had a more complex perspective, informed both by
their wartime experiences, but also by their awareness of Stalinist repres-
sion before and after the war. Deming Brown identifies a generation of
‘poets formed during the war’, for whom the war was ‘a time of complex
spiritual re-evaluation’.8 As children they had been brought up to believe
in the bright socialist future, but they were also uncomfortably aware of
the arrests of the late 1930s. They had been told that the Soviet army was
second to none, but then came the retreat of summer 1941. Hopes for
greater freedom at the end of the war were dashed by a new wave of
repression. Many of them, just beginning their literary careers as the war
came to an end, found it increasingly difficult to publish their work. As
early as 1945 critics were directing young poets to set aside the war theme;
it was evident that steps were being taken to avoid the public acknowl-
edgement of a generation of young people who had returned from the war
expecting that victory presaged changes at home. During the first post-war
decade these poets stayed largely in the background, some unable to
publish at all. With the onset of the cultural Thaw, however, came
opportunities to publish work in which wartime experience, viewed from a
distance, could be used to address broader issues relating to the Stalin era,
including the Terror.
These poets had been educated and formed, to a greater or lesser
degree, by their Stalinist environment. Unlike younger poets who made
their debuts in the mid-1950s and were able to represent a departure from
the Stalinist past, unburdened by any deep-seated attachment to it, they
had reached maturity under Stalin, and so their rejection of the past
involved a need to question the self which had been formed by that past.
Their poetry reflects the uncomfortable process of confronting values
which they had once accepted, if only temporarily and in part, and which
had now been publicly discredited.
It has been argued by Priscilla Johnson that the Party, in an attempt to
pursue ‘a policy of limited concessions’, encouraged critics to promote
these poets, whom she describes as: ‘a pleiad of gifted but hitherto some-
what overlooked writers, of whom several belong to the so-called wartime
generation now in its late thirties and forties and some to the category of
liberals’. The decision to promote this generation is seen by Johnson as a
measure to divert attention from younger, ‘temperamental new idols’.9 Cer-
tainly the older poets did not attract so much controversy, and tended to
prefer to encounter their readers on the printed page rather than at read-
ings attended by thousands. Yet their published poetry was not bland and
234 Katharine Hodgson
conformist. Without seeking extensive publicity, without being involved to
a significant extent in the apparatus of the Writers’ Union, they published
work which contributed to the process of the de-Stalinization of poetry, as
outlined above, as well as work which was rather more directly allied to the
official de-Stalinization agenda through its treatment of the war theme.
Work by several of the poets named by Johnson will be considered
here: Boris Slutskii, Aleksandr Mezhirov, David Samoilov and Evgenii
Vinokurov, together with their contemporaries Naum Korzhavin and
Boris Chichibabin, both of whom had experienced arrest and imprison-
ment or exile in the post-war Stalin years. Korzhavin was arrested in 1947
for having read, quite openly, poems criticizing Stalin, and was exiled until
1954. Chichibabin served five years in the camps after his arrest in 1946.
Slutskii, the oldest of the group, was born in 1919, and the youngest,
Evgenii Vinokurov and Naum Korzhavin, in 1925. All of them published
at least one collection of poetry during the Thaw years. Evgenii
Vinokurov’s first collection was published in 1951, his second in 1956, fol-
lowed by several collections in the early 1960s. Korzhavin was published in
the 1961 anthology Pages from Tarusa, and his own collection of verse
came out in 1963, the same year that Chichibabin published his debut col-
lection. Iurii Levitanskii’s first collection of poetry was published in 1948
in Irkutsk; others, also published in the provinces, appeared regularly,
including ones in 1959 and 1963. Aleksandr Mezhirov published his first
collection of poetry in 1947, and continued to publish regularly. David
Samoilov had to wait for 1958 for his first volume to appear; a second col-
lection was published in 1963. Slutskii’s debut collection was in 1957;
others followed in 1959, 1963 and 1964. Most of the poems to be discussed
here, related to the war theme and to the broader agenda of de-Stalinizing
poetry, appeared in their collections of the late 1950s and early 1960s;
those which addressed Stalin and the Terror directly were, for the most
part, only published many years after they were written.
Until the mid-1950s these poets had been left more or less on the side-
lines of Soviet literary life, unable to communicate to their readers the cat-
astrophes of their age, the prison camps and the war; now, as Boris Slutskii
wrote in a poem of the late 1950s which appeared thirty years later, they
had finally made contact:

Russia is reading us once more,

And not just turning over the pages.
Once more she catches our sidelong looks
And hints, sometimes muffled.

The Lazaruses have started to sing quietly,

And now ever more loudly we can hear
The grief of the hospital, the grief of the prison camp,
And the huge grief of war.
 The rehabilitation of poetry 235
And, obscurely, like the movement of
Clouds across the night skies,
Respect for us is awakening,
Ears are starting to catch our voices more keenly.
And once more we give lessons –
Ever more insistently and boldly.
And we are not ashamed to take for our lines
Seven rubles or more.10

As Slutskii’s poem suggests, it was now possible for poetry to be con-

sidered as an honourable profession once more, and for poets to resume
their role, established in nineteenth-century Russian tradition, as teacher,
truth-teller and national conscience.

De-Stalinizing the war

All the poets under discussion were of an age to have served in the war,
although Korzhavin, one of the youngest, spent the war as an evacuee.
Chichibabin served in the air force, but in a reserve regiment stationed in
the Caucasus region. The others served on the front line for at least part of
the war. Whether they contributed directly or indirectly to the war effort,
however, they knew that the victory appropriated by Stalin as evidence of
the virtues of the socialist system had been won by people motivated by a
variety of considerations, not exclusively dedication to the tenets of
Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism. They also remembered the hopes that had
been raised in wartime for a future free from the brutal repression of the
1930s, hopes that had been encouraged by the perceptible relaxation of lit-
erary controls, when lyric poetry was tolerated, even encouraged, by some
critics and writers who had begun to speak among themselves about
greater freedom of expression and the dissolution of the oppressive struc-
tures of the Writers’ Union.11 By the summer of 1945, however, there were
indications that memories of the war were deemed potentially disruptive
and a threat to Stalin’s authority.12 Prominent military figures such as
Marshal Zhukov were demoted, others were executed, and Stalin ruled
that Victory Day, 9 May, was no longer to be a public holiday after the
first anniversary of the end of the war in 1946. Under Khrushchev,
however, Victory Day became a public holiday once again, and efforts
were put into the construction of war memorials.
The Thaw saw the return of one of the most popular fictional figures of
wartime literature: Vasilii Terkin, the eponymous hero of Vasilii Terkin: a
Book about a Soldier, a long narrative poem written and published at
intervals during the war. Terkin was the creation of Aleksandr Tvar-
dovskii, an influential liberal, deeply involved in the cultural life of the
Khrushchev era. In the mid-1950s Terkin, a resourceful, cheerful and strik-
ingly apolitical Everyman, reappeared in a satirical narrative poem, Terkin
236 Katharine Hodgson
in the Other World, which circulated in manuscript form. It was finally
cleared for publication in 1963, once it had been read by the author to
Khrushchev in the company of distinguished foreign guests.13 This was a
tale, set in wartime, of Terkin’s brief sojourn in the infernal regions before
he was able to make his escape and return to the land of the living.
Terkin’s tour of the underworld revealed features which would have been
instantly recognizable to contemporary Soviet readers as satirical
representations of their own reality, past and present: the underworld has
its own hordes of bureaucrats, and its own organs of state security,
presided over by Stalin. As the only living soul in the world of the dead,
Terkin represented homely wisdom and decent human values, just as he
had done in Tvardovskii’s earlier work. By placing Terkin in a Soviet
underworld, Tvardovskii appeared to be implying that the wartime virtues
which he embodies set him apart from his infernal and familiar surround-
ings, and that the soldiers returning from war found themselves strangers
in the uncongenial, even hostile environment of the late Stalin years.
Terkin’s return to the Russian reading public coincided with the publi-
cation of numerous collections by poets, his non-fictional contemporaries,
in which war reminiscences played a significant part. The association of
war and poetic inspiration, remembered by Aleksandr Mezhirov, can be
interpreted both as one man’s creative response to extreme experiences,
but also as a reminder of how lyric poetry was revitalized during the war,
and, by implication, how it was subsequently suppressed. Recalling the
Leningrad front, Mezhirov comments:

The Muse lived there too,

Genuine, alive.
The silence of sentry-duty
Was not a burden with her alongside.

Because in the days of losses,

On the burned-out ruins,
She sang more often than she does now,
With more inspiration and more purity . . .14

In poems written several years after the war had ended, several of the
poets reflected on the long-term effect of their experiences. For Samoilov,
in a poem which appeared in the early 1960s, the war was primarily a
series of memories of his much younger and naïve self; his deeper under-
standing of the war came later:

How they coincided –

War, disaster, dreams and youth!
And all those things sank into me
And woke up again only later! . . .15
 The rehabilitation of poetry 237
Meanwhile, Vinokurov writes of the irresistible pressure to speak fully
of the world of war which he encountered at the age of seventeen; his
initial response to the strange and dreadful things that confronted him
there was, he says in a poem published in his 1964 collection Music, to
retreat into the depths of the self. Now, however, he begs for listeners to
whom he can reveal the abysses which were revealed to him then:

I was filled to the brim with what I had lived through.

The suffering which had driven me mad
Burst me open, just as the granaries are split
By corn in a year of terrifying harvest.

And words came. Rushing just like the logs

When they float timber down the river . . .
Not even for one day
Can I be silent, I beg you for the right,
Mine – to talk, yours – to hear me out . . .16

In poems which appeared in the early 1960s both Vinokurov and Iurii
Levitanskii evoke the sense of a profound inner transformation resulting
from their wartime sufferings; this is not related to any sense of their own
part in any historical mission, but to their perception of spiritual changes.
Vinokurov pinpoints the moment at the end of the war when he is sud-
denly aware of something new: he can sense the existence of a soul within
his body, as distinctly as he can sense the loaf of bread inside his kitbag.17
In a similar vein Levitanskii writes of having survived a close brush with
death in a field hospital; his poem ‘Resurrection’ ends with the words:

Leaning on a stick, I went out into the town.

I looked at the world through new eyes.

I consigned its faults to oblivion.

I soared above god and man.
All the philosophers of the world and all the prophets
seemed like little children to me.18

Levitanskii’s ‘My generation’, published in 1963, also explores the

transformative effect of war, playing on the ideas of prematurity and belat-
edness. Becoming part of a ‘late’ generation has endowed the poet – and
his surviving contemporaries – with a certain resilience:

And so I live now – late.

A leaf unfurls – late.
A light flares up – late.
Snow falls – late.
238 Katharine Hodgson
My leaf will not sway –
it is strong and won’t be torn off.
My light burns calmly –
it no longer fears the wind.
My snow piles up, builds up –
it is late, it will not melt any more.19

Poems about the war predominated in Boris Slutskii’s first published

collections. They are written in a deliberately dry and unembellished style
which contrasts with conventional official accounts privileging the heroic
and the extraordinary. Though Slutskii’s representations of the war might
seem innocuous to a contemporary reader, they were thought controver-
sial at the time. The poem below was first published in 1956. Its portrayal
of a dying soldier omits any description of the action in which he sustained
his fatal wounds, showing him as a passive figure. Although the poet con-
cludes by recognizing the soldier’s selfless devotion to the patriotic cause,
he departs from convention once more when he mentions, if only to
dismiss it, the possibility that it was compulsion, even coercion which had
led the man to his death on the battlefield:

Weary with the final weariness,

Seized by the indifference of impending death,
His big hands stretched out limply,
A soldier lies.
He could have been lying differently,
He could have been lying with his wife in his own bed,
He could have not been tearing at moss soaked in blood,
He could . . .
But could he? Really? Is it possible?
No, he could not.
The recruiting office sent his call-up papers.
Beside him officers walked and strode.
In the rear the tribunal hammered on its typewriter.
And if it hadn’t hammered, could he?
Hardly.
He would have gone himself, no need for call-up papers.
And not out of fear – out of conscience and honour.
A soldier lies – lies in a pool of blood,
But he does not wish to make any complaints.20

Here, as in other poems of the period, Slutskii gives a sober view of

patriotism, not to undermine it, but to extend the recognition of wartime
achievements to include those whose deaths were not heroic, and those
who may have been awkward soldiers, but who still played their part in
bringing about victory.21 When he considers his own contribution to the
 The rehabilitation of poetry 239
war effort, he is ambivalent. While poems published in the mid-1950s, ‘I
used to speak in Russia’s name’ and ‘How I was admitted to the Party’
express his satisfaction over carrying out his duties as a political officer,
other poems, unpublished at the time, express unease and guilt over his
participation in military tribunals dealing with disciplinary matters such as
desertion and deliberate self-harm.22 He was assigned this work because of
his unfinished legal education at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence,
and so became part of the state’s mechanism of coercion. In ‘I judged
people and know full well . . .’ Slutskii rejects the role of judge and wishes
to forget his ‘particular and vile’ experience, saying that the only such role
he might contemplate is that of football referee, since if they have dreams,
they do not cry out in their sleep.23 Another poem, also published in 1987,
recalls the poet’s non-regulation sense of sympathy when confronted with
a soldier accused of deliberate self-harm, when he imagines the soldier’s
own speculations as to whether Slutskii would turn out to be an enemy or
a friend.24 His poem ‘My school friends’, which appeared in 1991, contrasts
the fate of his school friends who all got killed at the front, with those of
fellow law students, almost all of whom came back from the battlefield
rather quickly. No explanation is offered, but the reader may guess what
their military service consisted of.25

Confronting the Stalinist inheritance

Slutskii’s poems remind the reader that ultimately, the war could not be
separated from the coercive Stalinist state. Other poets used the war as an
allegory for the Terror of the Stalin period, though not in work that was
published at the time. Aleksandr Mezhirov’s story of soldiers under
‘friendly fire’, which was circulating in manuscript form in 1956, ends with
an unmistakable allusion to a remark used to justify the Terror: ‘when you
chop down a forest the chips fly’:

We are standing in a bunch near Kolpino,

The artillery is firing at its own side.
The reconnaissance party
Must have given them the wrong reference point.

Shells fall short. Overshoot. Fall short.

Our own side is being fired at by the artillery.
We meant it when we took the Oath.
We blew up the bridges behind us, -
No-one will leave the trenches.
Shells fall short. Overshoot. Fall short.

We are lying in a bunch near Kolpino

And are shaking, riddled with smoke.
240 Katharine Hodgson
You should really shoot at the others,
But they are shooting at their own side, their own men.
The battalion commanders try to comfort us,
The great Motherland loves us,
The artillery batters its own side –
They’re not felling a forest, but still the chips fly. 26

Iurii Levitanskii uses another commonplace associated with Stalin-era

society – the image of people as cogs in a machine – in a poem of the
1950s, published decades later, which attempts to come to terms with the
‘epoch of the cult’. Levitanskii’s cogwheels are propelled by their loyalty
to Stalin, which is as reliable and automatic as mathematical certainties,
but they are revealed to be vulnerable human beings, wounded or dead in
battle:

Cogwheels, cogwheels
walk across the field.
Stalin is thinking of us.
We must not take one step back.
Two fours are four,
five fives are twenty-five.
But above the poor cogwheels
a crow soars.
And under the white bandage
a wound burns.
Vasen’kas, Viten’kas? –
I can’t recognise you.
Cogwheels, cogwheels
lie on the snow . . .’27

Levitanskii’s poem attempts to deal with his ambivalent feelings

towards Stalin, whom he describes both as teacher – ‘uchitel’’ – and tor-
mentor – ‘muchitel’’. Aleksandr Mezhirov too suggests that the question-
ing of Stalinist certainties is an uncomfortable experience for those who
have lost their ‘faith in the revolution and in Stalin, in the class nature of
existence’. Addressing a contemporary, he remembers a shared wartime
past:

You and I were fellow-soldiers,

We swore an oath to Stalin’s flag.

We walked on, accompanied by explosions,

Caused by us and by others.
O, how happy we would have been,
If we had been killed in the war!28
 The rehabilitation of poetry 241
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Slutskii tackled the question of his own
relations with Stalin and Stalinism in poems which emphasize a process of
rational detachment. Two of these were published in the Literary Gazette
in 1962. ‘The boss’ charts Slutskii’s move away from his devotion to Stalin
as a gradual process:

But all my life I worked for him,

Went to bed late, got up early.
I loved him. And was wounded for him.
But none of that helped me at all.
But I took his portrait with me everywhere.
I hung it in the dugout and in the tent –
Looked and looked at it,
couldn’t look at it enough.
And every year I was less and less
Upset by his lack of love.
And now my mood cannot be ruined
By the plain fact that since time immemorial
The bosses have not loved people like me.29

A recurring preoccupation for Slutskii is the need to dispel the aura of

mystery which surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. In a poem published in
1965 the realization of Stalin’s mortality is presented as the key which
releases the poet from his view of the leader as ‘lighthouse and harbour.
And everything. And nothing more’. This enables the poet to remove
Stalin as if he were nothing more than a crumpled shirt or a speck of fluff
on his coat; the comparison of Stalin to a crumpled shirt was removed
from the first published version of the poem.30 More poems of the early
1960s appeared in the late 1980s. In one, Slutskii notes his impressions on
viewing Stalin’s dead body: yesterday’s supreme ruler now looks like
somebody else, being much smaller than expected, grey and pock-
marked.31 In another, recalling Moscow on the day of Stalin’s funeral, in
‘Contemporary reflections’, the poet is struck by the city’s sense of empti-
ness, but also by the frenetic effort to expunge all remaining traces of the
dead leader:

Moscow was like a house

Abandoned, forsaken.
How shall we live without Stalin?
I looked all around:
Moscow was not sad,
Moscow was empty.
It is not possible to be sad without a break.
Everyone was tired to death.
Everyone was asleep, only the yard-keepers
242 Katharine Hodgson
Were sweeping furiously,
As if tearing at roots
And scraping them up from the earth,
As if ripping out of the chill soil
The shouts of his orders, the writing of his decrees:
The traces of the three-day death
And old traces –
Of thirty years of power,
Grandeur and disaster . . .32

Slutskii concludes by announcing optimistically: ‘Socialism has been

built. Let’s move people in’. Boris Chichibabin, however, was concerned
that Stalin’s legacy had not been entirely obliterated:

And does not Stalin’s spirit lurk

In us ourselves, cowardly and predatory,
When we do not seek the truth,
But are simply afraid of the new?
I shall charge at falsehood like a demon,
I will not yield in my fight with the old,
But what are we to do, when inside us Stalin is not dead? . . .33

Though Evtushenko had been able to publish his poem Stalin’s Heirs in
1962, which covered similar ground but was less forceful, Chichibabin, as a
former prisoner, was far less well connected; his poem circulated in manu-
script from the late 1950s.
Naum Korzhavin, like Chichibabin, had first-hand experience of Stalin-
ist repression, but had begun from a position of youthful idealism which he
shared with many of his generation, whom he would later describe as
victims of a tragic deception.34 His 1963 cycle ‘Naivety’ reflects on his feel-
ings of guilt at having approved of the enforced collectivization of the
peasantry. The Party activists’ decisiveness and devotion to the struggle,
which he had once admired, is now seen as the result of violence
unleashed by unthinking devotion to an idea.35 Korzhavin’s critique of the
mentality on which Stalinism was founded, in poems which could not be
published at the time, shows his conclusive detachment from his earlier
convictions. Slutskii is unable to be quite so categorical. ‘This is what our
descendants will say . . .’, considering how the Stalin era is likely to be
viewed in the future, has a tinge of resentment at the prospect that those
who lived orderly, dutiful lives will be seen as the villains, while the drunks
will be seen as the only people with a conscience. He concludes ruefully:
‘And we – the good ones, We were the bad ones’.36 Written in the late
1950s, it appeared in 1991, when his prediction had been fulfilled.
 The rehabilitation of poetry 243
The rehabilitation of poetry
Large numbers of poems which addressed the social and political legacy of
the Stalin era remained unpublished during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization.
The cultural Thaws did not extend to criticism of collectivization, which
was not among Stalin’s crimes enumerated by Khrushchev at the 20th
Party Congress. They did, however, enable poets to rediscover the so-
called ‘eternal themes’ of lyric poetry: love and nature, the meaning of life
and death, and to contemplate the power of poetic language to renew per-
ceptions. The role of poetry and the poet became a prominent concern,
with a renewed sense of confidence in the poet as truth-teller and national
conscience. The poet’s role in the recuperation of truth is seen as a labori-
ous process in Vinokurov’s ‘So just start to tell the truth!’, published in
1964. This is an exhortation (to the reader, to poets, to the poet himself) to
speak the plain, essential truth, go down and search for it in the cellar’s
darkest recesses, and come back with a tiny grain quivering in the palm of
the hand.37 Levitanskii treats the serious subject of poetic responsibility
with a lighter touch in ‘A poem in which a goose appears’, published in
1963. The poet is visited by a talking goose which offers him its feathers
for use as quills. They will, it promises, bring him success. But the poet
replies: ‘It isn’t pens which lie, but people, in essence’ and adds:

O goose, your eternal feathers

cannot save a liar anyway.
And the point isn’t in the pens, oh no,
but in conscience, honour, and taste. . . .38

A theme associated with the poet’s self-imposed task of carrying out his
responsibilities honourably is that of memory. Even when poems are not
explicit about what is to be remembered and why, the historical context in
which they were written, a time when Soviet society’s collective amnesia
was undergoing treatment, predisposes readers to look for allegories of
the recently unmentionable past. Vinokurov uses apparently innocent
nature imagery to consider the theme of memory in a poem published in
1960. While grass growing in spring has no memory of the previous year’s
grass and is happy without a memory, the poet has a different view of
memory’s reality:

But for me it’s like this: I have wandered into a dense forest
Of memories and cannot find my way out into the light . . .
The world of the past! But it vanished long ago!
It’s a long time since it actually existed!

It used to exist, then vanished like a mirage.

Since then some fifteen years or so have passed . . .
244 Katharine Hodgson
But I am wandering in thick forest, wandering
With grazes on my face from the thrashing twigs.39

The poem withholds any further explanation of the precise nature of

these labyrinthine memories; it is open to readers to bring their own inter-
pretations. The act of remembering is accompanied by anxiety and pain, but
there is no attempt to deny the continued presence of the past. By maintain-
ing a lack of certainty over the interpretation of his poem, Vinokurov was
both ensuring that it would find its way to his readers, and that it would not
be limited by the kind of linear thinking which had dominated in earlier
published poetry, and which left no room for ambiguity or mystery.
Rather less suited for publication were poems which considered the
subject of censorship and self-censorship; Slutskii wrote a few succinct and
unsparing evocations of the compromises which he had made; these poems
appeared many years later. He noted how he had saved a poem from the
censor by the simple device of removing one short syllable: ‘not’:

NOT – three letters. Not even a word.

NOT – I removed. And then it was ready.
You cross it out and then curse

All the inventors of alphabets.

And then you live in a business-like way,
Well-fed, washed, comfortably you live.40

The shame of such compromise is evident also in ‘I varnish reality . . .’,

in which Slutskii describes the violence he does to his poems in making
them adhere to the norm as breaking their arms and chopping off their
legs.41 Vinokurov’s ‘Pain’, published in 1956, attributes the difficulties he
experiences in expressing painful emotions in his poetry to ingrained habit
rather than censorship. The poem makes it clear that this habit has been
instilled by the demands of his militarized and disciplined epoch. He
describes his habitual rhythm as an ‘infantryman’s iamb’ which is unsuited
for sorrow and longing, but admits:

My sorrow over you gnaws at me today,

And I am sad, and there is nothing wrong with that . . .
But my pain still cannot ring out
Through the trumpet rhythm of my iron verse.42

Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs that the ‘iron verse’ fostered by
the Stalin period is capable of transformation. A common theme is
the revitalizing power of the creative word when the poet releases it into
the world. One of the most salient features of Stalin-era culture was the
atrophy of the language of public discourse, including poetry, into formu-
 The rehabilitation of poetry 245
lae which were drained of meaning by repetition and misuse. In poems
published in 1962 and 1959, both Vinokurov and Levitanskii delight in the
renewal of language. Vinokurov’s ‘The word’ presents an image of archae-
ologists digging up a vessel from an ancient burial mound; when they rub
it, the word is released and cannot be brought back. The poem ends by
reminding the reader that not all words have this mysterious power: there
are some words your eyes just slide over, empty pods with no peas in
them.43 Levitanskii’s evocation of the renewal of language takes the poet
back to the primeval forest where he encounters the earliest human ances-
tor in the act of creating the first words. The poet receives these new
words and brings them back to the present:

They are still ringing like a bowstring,

and like an arrow shot from the bow.
They are made of colour, scent, and sound.
The dew on them has not yet dried . . .44

This is a declaration of poetry as a process of creative regeneration,

returning to its origins in order to make a new beginning. In his evocation
of poetic inspiration, published in his 1963 collection, Samoilov goes
underground, portraying the poet waiting patiently in a mineshaft, listen-
ing for the tapping on the other side of the rock wall which indicates that
poetry is about to break through.45 Another poem from the same collec-
tion celebrates the mystery of ordinary words:

And I realised that there are no

Worn out words or things.
Their essence, to the very core,
Is exploded by a shaken genius.
And the wind is far more extraordinary
when it’s the wind and not a zephyr.

I love ordinary words,

They are like unexplored lands.
It’s only at first that you understand them,
Then their meaning becomes misty.
They are polished like glass,
And that is what our craft is.46

The re-affirmation of the beauty and mystery of ordinary language goes

together with a new confidence in the poet’s right to concern himself with
subjects which were previously considered too intimate or trivial, and to
illuminate the everyday.
Lyric poetry which captures a fleeting mood or perception had been thor-
oughly marginalized under Stalin, but made a recovery in the mid-1950s.
246 Katharine Hodgson
This should not be seen as a mere pendant to the politically pointed writing
which contributed to the re-evaluation of the Stalin era, but as a move to
reclaim the territory proper to lyric poetry, territory which had been turned
into forbidden ground because it was apolitical and individual.
Vinokurov writes in 1958 of an intimate domestic scene in ‘My beloved
was doing the washing’, moved to sympathy at the sight of his wife, believ-
ing herself unobserved, going about her laborious laundering.47 Numerous
poems by Samoilov evoke and contemplate landscape and weather, and
the poet’s fleeting perceptions of his surroundings. Often he chooses to
portray a landscape on the brink of change, such as spring, the start of
winter, or early autumn.48 Samoilov’s poems often deal with refreshed per-
ceptions which depart from the obvious and conventional: ‘The snow lift’,
from his 1958 collection, looks at falling snow and imagines that the snow
is in fact hanging stationary while the city rises upwards. The snow is:

whiter than a white horse,

It is fresher than milk,
It is heaped up to the very eaves,
It is sifted through hundreds of sieves.
Now it hangs motionless,
It’s the city which is flying upwards.

The city – up, past the nets of snow,

The city – up, to the children’s delight.
Past the snows
Fly lampposts,
Windows,
Chimneys,
Clocks,
Cornices –
Straight into the slow blizzard . . .49

It was the revival of lyric poetry, as well as the first tentative and not-so-
tentative explorations of the compromised past, which brought these poets
back to their readers. As Slutskii acknowledged, if somewhat grudgingly,
readers had made their own contribution to the poetry of the Thaw. His
poem ‘Readers’ Opinions’, which appeared only in 1986, notes that
although they may have lacked an appreciation of the finer points of
grammar, they were quick to respond to authors’ cowardice by leaving
their books on the shelf:

Forgetting how he had bowed his own spine,

The reader pulled us by the tongue,
Despised those obedient to the rules
And applauded the outspoken.
 The rehabilitation of poetry 247
Although it irritated many of us,
This hounding by our readers,
Although the pressure of the angry masses
Made us feel sorry for ourselves, -
Still this heightened interest
Had its effect on the literary process.50

The revival of Russian poetry in the mid-1950s and early 1960s was some-
thing which embraced poets of all generations, including young poets at the
start of their career, and older poets re-starting careers interrupted by the
years of strict censorship. The older poets whose work is discussed here
were either completing or about to embark on their higher education when
the war broke out; their literary careers were delayed by the war, or by post-
war cultural constraints, or both. Not all of them enjoyed immediate success
at the time, and, indeed risked being eclipsed both by their elders who had
their roots in pre-revolutionary Russian literature, and their juniors who
could claim to belong to the post-Stalin world. Their particular vantage
point, however, enabled them to draw on the legacy of the war years when it
became possible to release themselves and their poetry from the restrictions
of the Stalin era, and to play their part in restoring the good name of
Russian poetry both in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their readers.

Notes
1 N. Aseev, ‘O strukturnoi pochve v poezii’, Den’ poezii, Moscow: Moskovskii
rabochii, 1956, pp. 55–7; O. Berggol’ts, ‘Razgovor o lirike’, Literaturnaia gazeta,
16 April 1953, 3, and ‘Protiv likvidatsii liriki’, ibid., 28 October 1954, 3–4; Il’ia
Sel’vinskii, ‘Nabolevshii vopros’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 October 1954.
2 See G. Hosking, ‘The Twentieth Century, 1953–80’, in C. Moser (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992, pp. 529–30, and A. Surkov (ed.), Kratkaia literaturnaia
entsiklopediia, 9 vols, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1962–78, vol. II, 1964,
p. 594. See also P. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: the Politics of Soviet
Culture, 1963–64, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965, p. 4, on the postpone-
ment of Poetry Day in 1962.
3 J. Garrard and C. Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, London & New
York: I.B. Tauris, 1999, p. 66.
4 Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, pp. 30–44.
5 Ibid., 10–13, 23–7 and 5–6.
6 A. Tvardovskii, ‘Za dal’iu – dal’’ appeared in instalments between 1956 and
1960; E. Evtushenko, ‘Nasledniki Stalina’, Pravda, 21 October 1962; B. Slutskii,
‘Bog’ and ‘Khoziain’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 24 November 1962.
7 Report of the Central Committee to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party,
Moscow, February 14, 1956, London: Soviet News, 1956.
8 D. Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1978, pp. 80–1.
9 Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, p. 81.
10 B. Slutskii, ‘Snova nas chitaet Rossiia . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols, Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991, vol. I, p. 226.
248 Katharine Hodgson
11 D. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory: sovetskaia literatura 1940-kh godov pod
politicheskim kontrolem TsK, Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1994, pp. 98–102.
12 See V. Zhabinskii, Prosvety: zametki o sovetskoi literature 1956–57 g.,
München: Izdanie tsentral’nogo ob’’edineniia politicheskikh emigrantov iz
SSSR, 1958, pp. 118–19.
13 L. Kopelew and R. Orlowa, Wir lebten in Moskau, München: Goldmann
Verlag, 1990, p. 25. See also Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, pp. 68–9.
14 A. Mezhirov, ‘Desantniki’, Izbrannoe, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1989, p. 561.
15 D. Samoilov, ‘Sorokovye’, Izbrannoe, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1980, p. 54.
16 E. Vinokurov, ‘Proshla voina. Rasskazy invalidov . . .’, Izbrannoe, 2 vols,
Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976, vol. I, p. 245.
17 E. Vinokurov, ‘Vyzhil’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 254.
18 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Moe voskresen’e’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975, pp. 59–60.
19 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Moe pokolenie’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, pp. 51–2.
20 B. Slutskii, ‘Posledneiu ustalost’iu ustav . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, pp. 93.
21 See, for example, ‘On prosbami nadoedal . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, 382,
and ‘Nashi’, ibid., pp. 392–3, both published in 1987.
22 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia govoril ot imeni Rossii’, vol. I, p. 107 and ‘Kak menia prinimali v
partiiu’, ibid., pp. 95–6.
23 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia sudil liudei i znaiu tochno . . .’, ibid., p. 145.
24 B. Slutskii, ‘Pristal’nost’ pytlivuiu ne priacha . . .’, ibid., p. 144.
25 B. Slutskii, ‘Moi tovarishchi po shkole’, ibid., p. 384.
26 A. Mezhirov, ‘My pod Kolpinom skopom stoim . . .’, Izbrannoe, pp. 561–2.
27 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Vse gaechki da vintiki, a Bog – u pul’ta . . .’, Rekviem, Moscow:
Sovremennik, 1989, pp. 263–4.
28 A. Mezhirov, ‘Chto ty plachesh’, staraia razvalina . . .’, Izbrannoe, p. 34.
29 B. Slutskii, ‘Khoziain’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 171.
30 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia ros pri Staline, no pristal’no . . .’, ibid., p. 414.
31 B. Slutskii, ‘Ne pulia byla na izlete, ne ptitsa . . .’, ibid., p. 169.
32 B. Slutskii, ‘Sovremennye razmyshleniia’, ibid., pp. 167–8.
33 B. Chichibabin, ‘Klianus’ na znameni veselom . . .’, http://lib.ru/POEZIQ/
CHICHIBABIN/sbornik.txt
34 N. Korzhavin, ‘Po kom zvonit kolokol’, Vremena, Frankfurt am Main: Posev,
1976, pp. 282–6.
35 N. Korzhavin, ‘Naivnost’, Vremena, pp. 303–10.
36 B. Slutskii, ‘Vot chto skazhut potomki . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 285.
37 E. Vinokurov, ‘Tak nachinai zhe pravdu govorit!’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 241.
38 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Stikhotvorenie, v kotorom poiavliaetsia gus’, Vospominan’e o
krasnom snege, pp. 79–80.
39 E. Vinokurov, ‘Vesnoiu novoi novaia trava . . .’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 130. See
also ‘Pamiat’, vol. I, p. 253.
40 B. Slutskii, ‘Byl pechal’nyi, a stal pechatnyi . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p.
245.
41 B. Slutskii, ‘Lakiruiu deistvitelnost, ispravliaiu stikhi . . .’, ibid., p. 247. The first
words: ‘I varnish reality’ allude to Vladimir Pomerantsev’s 1953 article, ‘On sin-
cerity in literature’, Novyi mir, 12, 1953, 218–45.
42 E. Vinokurov, ‘Bol’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 68.
43 E. Vinokurov, ‘Slovo’, ibid., p. 153.
44 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Otkuda vy prikhodite, slova . . .’, Vospominan’e o krasnom
snege, pp. 15–16.
45 D. Samoilov, ‘Vdokhnoven’e’, Izbrannoe, p. 63.
 The rehabilitation of poetry 249
46 D. Samoilov, ‘Slova’, ibid., p. 64. The sixth line of the first stanza quoted is diffi-
cult to translate adequately, as it plays on two words for ‘wind’: the standard
‘veter’ and the consciously poetic ‘vetr’.
47 E. Vinokurov, ‘Moia liubimaia stirala . . .’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 69.
48 See, for example, Samoilov, ‘Nachalo zimnikh dnei’, Izbrannoe, p. 24; ‘Chernyi
topol’’, ibid., pp. 76–7; ‘Krasnaia osen’’, ibid., p. 82.
49 D. Samoilov, ‘Snezhnyi lift’, Izbrannoe, pp. 30–1.
50 B. Slutskii, ‘Chitatel’skie otsenki’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 484.
13 Renouncing dogma, teaching
utopia
Science in schools under
Khrushchev
Michael Froggatt

Science and technology always played a significant role in the validating

ideology of the Soviet Union; Marxism–Leninism claimed to be a scientific
doctrine and asserted that it would advance all that was progressive and
advantageous in the European scientific tradition, stripping it of bourgeois
ideological distortions and self-interest, laying the material and techno-
logical basis for the achievement of communism and transforming
mankind in the process. This utopian vision of scientific advancement had
been very pronounced in the public culture of the 1920s but receded
during the 1930s as pragmatic, technological achievements, subordinated
to the immediate economic goals of a rapidly industrializing country,
received more prominence.1 Theoretical science once again became a
focus of attention in the post-war years, as Lysenkoism and its imitators
were aggressively propagandized across the USSR and the past triumphs
of Russian science were cynically exaggerated by ideologues. Despite dra-
matic changes in the rhetorical presentation of science during the process
of de-Stalinization, the natural sciences remained a prominent topic in
propaganda, the arts and such limited forums for public discussion as
existed during the 1950s and 1960s. This renewed interest in fundamental
sciences, and their broader impact on the ‘worldview’ of Soviet citizens,
reached its peak in the early 1960s, when Soviet achievements in physics
and the space race coincided with the peak of Khrushchev’s own personal
authority.
This chapter examines how the ideological framework within which the
natural sciences were taught in Soviet classrooms was constructed and
evolved during the 1950s and early 1960s. Ideology permeated every
subject in primary and secondary education, from Lysenkoist biology to
astronomy and the ‘microworld’ of atomic physics. This chapter, by con-
sidering the themes of nationalism and ‘scientific atheism’ in scientific edu-
cation will examine the political and ideological lessons that students were
supposed to draw from the natural sciences, how these lessons changed
during the course of de-Stalinization and how educators themselves per-
ceived and influenced these changes in the curriculum.
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 251
Soviet patriotism in science teaching, 1953–64
The ideological campaign led by Zhdanov (Zhdanovshchina) had, from
1947, initiated a radical reappraisal of the history of science in Russia, in
an attempt to foster ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the field of natural sciences.
Historians, educators, lecturers and authors of works of popular science
set out to ‘rediscover’ the achievements of Russian scientists, which had
supposedly been neglected both by the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia,
deceived by the ‘Germans’ within the Academy of Sciences, and foreign-
ers, who were scornful of the intellectual achievements of the Slavs. The
most obvious beneficiary of this reworking of history was the eighteenth-
century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, whose already considerable reputa-
tion was artificially inflated by crediting him with later discoveries such as
the law of the conservation of energy (which was also, conveniently, one of
the cornerstones of Marxist dialectical materialism).2
This trend towards ‘rediscovering’ the priority (prioritet) of Russian sci-
entists took an increasingly xenophobic course as the Cold War developed
and, following the victory of Lysenkoism at the notorious August Session
of 1948, ruthless purges swept through the scientific intelligentsia.3 A host
of lesser figures were soon added to the pantheon of great Russian (and it
was, without exception, Russian) scientists, so that by the end of the 1940s
it had been established that Russians had invented, amongst other things,
the radio, the light bulb, the aeroplane, arc welding, steam engines and the
telegraph. The Soviet regime was determined that Russians should be pre-
sented as a people of great practical ingenuity, contrasting with the stereo-
typical image, both at home and abroad, of Russian scientists as
theoretically brilliant but unable to bring work to technical fruition.
Therefore, by the early 1950s, Soviet schoolchildren were expected to
have very definite ideas about the history of Russian science and its rela-
tionship with the capitalist world. The teaching plan for physics in the
1952–53 teaching year noted that:

The teaching of Soviet patriotism and Soviet pride is one of the most
important tasks standing before physics teachers . . . Therefore histori-
cism in the teaching of physics acquires great significance. Students
finishing middle schools must not only know the names of M.V.
Lomonosov, A.S. Popov, K.E. Tsiolkovskii, N.E. Zhukovskii, A.F.
Mozhaiskii, P.N. Lebedev, A.G. Stoletov, V.V. Petrov, A.N. Lodygin,
B.S. Iakobi, E.K. Lents, P.N. Iablochikov, N.G. Slavianov, and I.I.
Pol’zunov, but must remember their significance in general science.
The question of the priority of the scientists of our country must be
put to students with absolute clarity.4

This list no doubt included some undeservedly ignored scientists, but

the majority of the names belonged to minor electro-technicians of the
252 Michael Froggatt
nineteenth century, whose work had been granted retrospective promi-
nence when Russia became the ‘home of electricity’ under the Soviets.
Nonetheless students were forced to learn the significance of their work in
mind-numbing detail. A characteristic omission was the absence of the
names of any scientists whose reputation had been made after 1917; due to
the turbulent state of the Soviet scientific community in the early 1950s,
few living authorities were considered reliable enough to be included in
textbooks and, indeed, textbooks were curiously silent about recent
achievements in Soviet science. Astronomy and Lysenkoist genetics, both
considered too ideologically significant to be ignored, were exceptions to
this rule, but chemistry, biology and physics textbooks were otherwise
largely devoid of Soviet achievements.
Knowing that Russians had been pioneers in every field of scientific
endeavour was however insufficient; the other vital lesson of ‘Soviet patrio-
tism’ was that Russian scientists had always placed their love of the mother-
land before their desire for recognition abroad or personal profit.
Therefore, according to the curriculum in 1953–54, students were required
to know that I.V. Michurin, supposed mentor of Lysenko, was ‘a significant
scientist able to create many valuable strains of fruit trees and plants for his
homeland, that he was a great patriot and flat-out refused to go and work in
America’.5 Similar stories were also recounted about Mendeleev, P.N.
Lebedev and other heroes of pre-revolutionary science, but educators also
sought more inventive ways of denigrating the scientific mentality of the
West, hoping these would appeal to children. One Lysenkoist recom-
mended taking students around a local zoo and telling them that it was only
thanks to Lysenkoist doctrines about the ‘importance of environmental
factors’ that Soviet zoo-keepers knew how to care for animals; in the West,
where such factors would not be taken into consideration, animals would
be deprived of food, water and heat.6 A guide to teaching astronomy,
written in 1952 and used for many years afterwards, made a crude attempt
at guilt by association by noting that the USA printed 20 astrological jour-
nals and 3000 syndicated newspaper columns on astrology, and that in this
sense it was similar in its philosophical ‘idealism’ to Nazi Germany, whose
crimes had also been partially inspired by worship of astrology.7
The level of ‘Soviet patriotism’ considered appropriate varied from
discipline to discipline. This can best be shown by the example of a series
of posters of famous scientists commissioned by the RSFSR Ministry of
Education early in 1953 to decorate the walls of classrooms. The famous
faces portrayed on the posters issued for chemistry and biology were
almost exclusively those of Russians, with the exception of the
Lysenkoists’ great French forebear Lamarck and Soviet favourite Darwin
(whose ‘second homeland’ was, of course, Russia). Furthermore, the only
living figures worthy of the admiration of Soviet schoolchildren were
Lysenko himself and his follower, the uneducated charlatan Olga Lep-
eshinskaia. By contrast, the posters issued for physics largely portrayed
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 253
foreigners, including Galileo, Faraday, Newton and Marie Curie, with only
a handful of Russians, such as Zhukovskii and Lodygin, present.8 Such an
imbalance could also be observed in textbooks; biology textbooks, rewrit-
ten by Lysenkoists in the late 1940s, rarely had a good word for any
foreign scientist after Darwin, whilst physics textbooks tended to remain
more cosmopolitan, partially due to the preponderance of laws which
came with Anglo-Saxon names attached, something the discipline could
hardly avoid.9 This imbalance is largely explained by the relative resistance
of the physics and chemistry communities to the Lysenko-inspired purges
of the late 1940s, which contrasted dramatically with the complete
disintegration of the biology community under the ideological pressure
exerted from above.
The education of students in ‘Soviet patriotism’ was undoubtedly
strongest in biology, due to the overwhelming dominance of Lysenkoists
in the higher echelons of the educational establishment. Students were to
be informed that there existed ‘two worlds’ in biology, a ‘materialist’
Soviet biology in the USSR and an ‘idealist’ Mendelist biology in the
West, which united the interests of the Catholic hierarchy, the Nazis and
the Ku Klux Klan-influenced US government. Having completed their unit
on Darwinism, students were expected to answer the following questions:
‘What is the error and class essence of “Social Darwinism?” What signific-
ance has a correct resolution of the origin of man in the struggle of materi-
alism with idealism?’.10 They were also to be informed that, apart from
justifying racial hatred and oppression, the chief role of biologists in the
West was the development of germ warfare for use in Korea. However,
this remained insufficient for the Lysenkoists, with one arguing in late
1953: ‘The absence of Timiriazev, Vil’iams, the achievements of Michurin
on the introduction of new species, only brief mentions of Lysenko – all
this lowers the education of Soviet patriotism’.11
The rewriting of scientific history did not go completely unchallenged in
other disciplines, as many educators saw it as detrimental to the education
of pupils and therefore an affront to their own professional dignity. A
report on standards in chemistry teaching in 1953 admitted as much when
it noted approvingly that study of the work of Lomonosov, Mendeleev and
others, educated students ‘with feelings of Soviet patriotism and national
pride’ but admitted that students’ actual knowledge of chemistry was
extremely poor, leading them to ‘confuse atoms and molecules, atomic and
molecular weight, bases and acids’. Nonetheless, it smugly concluded that
teachers were doing a good job, as the ‘majority of students leaving middle
school . . . understand the achievements of our chemistry and the priority
of Russian scientists in scientific discoveries’.12 However, even prior to
Stalin’s death, the ‘patriotic’ distortions in the curriculum were not
accepted so complacently by educators. During a discussion of textbooks
for physics in January 1953 one of the authors argued against yet another
attempt to appropriate scientific discoveries for Lomonosov; in this case
254 Michael Froggatt
he was to be credited with the discovery of absolute zero, which had
allegedly been unjustly ignored until its ‘rediscovery’ a century later by the
‘idealist’ Lord Kelvin. The author stated: ‘It is entirely unnecessary that, in
order to prove the priority of our science, we need to denigrate the
achievements of scientists of other nations’.13
Such complaints began to mount after Stalin’s death and, during a dis-
cussion of new biology textbooks in December 1954, another author noted:
‘It is impossible to write in a distorted form about science in the West. They
are ahead of us in many questions of physiology. It is often said officially at
conferences that we are decades behind. The West has its science too. We
must consider our own science, but this does not mean relating thought-
lessly towards foreign science’.14 This more liberal approach to educating
students about Western science mirrored attempts to expose the scientific
community itself to more Western influence after 1953, with increased
attention being paid to organizing international conferences and exchanges
of scientists. The USSR also ended its boycott of the Nobel Prizes following
Stalin’s death, receiving as a reward its first laureate, as Academician N.N.
Semenov was awarded the prize for chemistry in 1956.15
Teachers and authors of textbooks do seem to have generally believed,
with some justification, that the Russian contribution to science had been
neglected in the past; however, there also seems to have been a growing
consensus that the inflated boasts of the Zhdanovshchina were harmful
rather than constructive. One textbook author, also speaking in December
1954, noted:

We do not cover the question of the illumination of the role of great

scientists correctly in our textbooks in some disciplines. Quite cor-
rectly, during 1948, we decided to throw out pictures of famous
foreign scientists, in order to make a break (perelom). But today we
are lagging behind and this, to a certain extent, also applies to higher
schools. There are teachers who come to middle schools not knowing
the names of the great scientists connected with the development of
certain areas of chemistry.16

The ignorance of teachers in some disciplines was hardly surprising; as

the director of one pedagogical institute’s biology department noted,
teachers were told ‘it is necessary to know about world science. That’s all
very well, I’m very interested by world science, but try, under our con-
ditions, finding out about world science’. He noted that the idea that
teachers could request biology textbooks through libraries was ‘largely a
fiction’, which was hardly surprising given that any foreign works which
could be used to disprove the work of Trofim Lysenko were quickly rele-
gated to a restricted section (spetskhran).17
The precedent for gradually diminishing the influence of ‘Soviet patrio-
tism’ in the science curriculum was established within higher schools by a
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 255
decree of the Ministry of Higher Education, issued on 25th February 1955,
which praised the increased attention paid to the history of science since
1950 but decreed that lecturers must now turn their attention to the
‘achievements not only of native [otechestvennaia], but also world, science
and technology’.18 This theme was further developed during the Central
Committee plenum of July 1955, which renewed calls for scientists and
technologists to study the experience of the capitalist world in areas where
the enemy was ahead of the USSR; the old criticism of those who ‘bowed
and scraped’ to Western authorities was now quietly dropped.19 The deci-
sive turning point for secondary education came a year later, with a circu-
lar sent to teachers following the 30 June 1956 Central Committee decree
‘On Overcoming the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’. This circu-
lar outlined a series of corrections both in style and content that needed to
be introduced into all areas of the school curriculum, and the natural sci-
ences were not excluded:

In school textbooks the whole development of science and technology

is ascribed to a number of individually outstanding scientists and engi-
neers. Not denying the great service of outstanding personalities – the
authors of great discoveries and inventions – it is necessary to turn
attention to the creative achievements of the masses. . . . It is necessary
to show that each great discovery in science, each invention, is pre-
pared by many people. This is insufficiently covered in present text-
books. . . .20

Not only did the circular thus criticize the ‘great man’ approach to the
study of history, which had been so characteristic of late Stalinism, it also
called for science to be taught to students in a context that emphasized its
internationalist, universal attributes:

The names of national scientists and innovators in production and the

practical activity of the masses, the base for the development of scient-
ific and technical ideas, must be known to students. However, science
and technology develop not only on the basis of the accumulation of
national experience, but also on the basis of the experience of the
whole world. Students must have general concepts of the world-
historical basis of the development of science and technology.
Teachers should select and introduce factual material covering this.
Showing the priority of our country in a series of discoveries, inven-
tions and technical improvements, we cannot at the same time forget
the achievements of foreign countries in this or that historical epoch.
It must be explained to students that for the further elevation of all
areas of the economic and cultural life of our country we must study
all aspects of foreign science and technology, using in the interests of
the Soviet people all that is best from other countries.21
256 Michael Froggatt
It should be noted that demonstrating the achievements of ‘foreign
countries in this or that historical epoch’ in no way ruled out denigrating
current achievements in capitalist countries and assuming, unquestion-
ingly, that the socialist USSR was now outstripping the West.
The decree also indicated that science teaching needed to place more of
an emphasis on creative discussion of scientific issues: ‘With the goal of
overcoming the consequences of the cult of personality, it is necessary to
explain to students that scientific theory is not frozen dogma, but requires
creative development and perfection’. It was especially noted, in a rebuke to
the Lysenkoists, that when studying Michurinism, ‘it is not necessary to
name Michurin himself many times’ or ‘blindly follow his methods’ but
instead agricultural methods should be demonstrated with practical
examples.22 However, it should be noted that the decree generally avoided
attaching the taint of ‘the cult of personality’ or of Stalin’s name to any
particular scientific schools, as debate remained heated within the scientific
community over the various Stalinist dogmas in genetics, evolutionary
theory, psychology and astronomy which had been imposed upon the scient-
ific intelligentsia in the late 1940s. Even Lysenko, the most visible exponent
of ‘Stalinist science’, who appeared particularly vulnerable in 1956, and was
removed as President of the All-Union Agricultural Academy that April,
had already begun to sway Khrushchev’s ideas on agriculture and was there-
fore to a certain extent shielded from public criticism.23
Despite these uncertainties, the decree seemed to hold the promise of a
substantial change of emphasis in the science curriculum and indeed, after
1956, the ‘patriotic’ content of the science curriculum became considerably
less prominent, although in many places it was retained in a milder form.
The most conspicuously exaggerated statements were removed from text-
books, such as the following claim about the study of the nature of galax-
ies, included in a 1952 textbook on astronomy but removed from its 1962
edition:

all the most recent information regarding the details of their constitu-
tion, the composition of their ‘populations’, the form of their stars and
planets, in a word everything that is now known about galaxies, has
been established by Soviet scientists.24

A meeting in July 1958 to assess demands on physics textbooks stated

that students should now study ‘not the dead physics and technology of the
past, but living science, always developing and enriched by the practical
activity of many people’. One of the speakers also took evident satisfac-
tion in the cosmopolitan content of Soviet physics textbooks, noting stu-
dents could find in their pages Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, a Pole
(Marie Curie) and a Dane (Bohr). However, he could not resist comparing
this to parochial French and English textbooks, which engaged in ‘blatant
falsification’ by claiming Edison as the inventor of the light bulb, and
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 257
ignored the works of the Russian electro-engineers Iablochkov and
Lodygin ‘although their works are known to the whole world’.25 These
‘rediscovered’ heroes of Russian physics and engineering were now falling
out of favour, with the authors of textbooks requesting permission to
remove these ‘pioneers’ from their own books, arguing the ‘steam engines’
and ‘telegraphs’ invented by their Russian forebears had little in common
with these machines as they were usually understood, a situation which
only confused students about the scientific principles behind important
technological milestones.26
The 1958 reform of education, which increased the number of hours
allotted to scientific education and especially emphasized practicality, saw
a further reduction in the historicism of the scientific curriculum, as prac-
tical knowledge now came to be valued over ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the sci-
ences. However, it should be noted that contemporary Soviet scientists
were still not found to fill the newly created gaps and, at least in the official
science syllabus, the achievements of Soviet science remained largely
ignored; one physics textbook published in 1958 for the final year of
secondary schools required students to be acquainted with only one post-
revolutionary innovation, an electro-plating technique, the significance of
which was hardly earth-shattering.27
Therefore, by the late 1950s the science curriculum in schools had been
largely liberated from the stifling ‘patriotic’ requirements of the late 1940s,
a move which received widespread support from scientific educators, who
were concerned that ignorance of foreign scientific achievements was
having a detrimental impact on the scientific knowledge of their students.
These educators, themselves genuinely proud of the Russian scientific her-
itage, continued to defend those claims to priority that seemed most justi-
fied and remained aggrieved about perceived Western arrogance long
after the most glaring historical distortions in the syllabus had been
removed. They now encouraged students to think of science as a global
phenomenon which, despite the progressive role of the USSR, required
them to pay attention to advances in the capitalist world in order to
further advance the science and technology of their homeland. Teachers
were also instructed to de-emphasize the role of ‘great men’ in the history
of science, instead presenting science as a collective endeavour in which
‘the masses’ played a crucial role. Despite these changes, it is by no means
true that the science curriculum in schools had become any less ‘ideo-
logical’ during the years immediately after Stalin’s death, as was
demonstrated by a renewed focus on another aspect of scientific education
– ‘scientific atheism’.

‘Scientific’ atheism in science teaching, 1953–64

Open attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church and vocal anti-religious
agitation had not had the prominence in post-war Stalinism that they had
258 Michael Froggatt
received in the 1930s, when uncoordinated and aggressive propaganda
campaigns accompanied physical attacks on priests, believers and
churches.28 Stalin’s central concerns in restoring a stable relationship with
the Orthodox patriarchy during the Great Patriotic War had been the re-
establishment of Soviet control in the areas recaptured from the Nazi
occupiers in 1943 and 1944, and the need to create an impression of mod-
eration to secure the support of the Western powers.29 The desire to
achieve these political aims had led to the ‘statization’ of the Orthodox
Church between 1943 and 1948, and less of an emphasis on combating
‘vestiges of the past’ in the mentality of the people. The political value of
the Orthodox Church subsequently fell in the late 1940s, as the Soviet
state once again imposed its full internal security apparatus and the Cold
War hardened. Nonetheless, despite a September 1944 decree encouraging
renewed anti-religious propaganda, ‘scientific atheism’ remained a low pri-
ority at all levels of the Soviet propaganda establishment in the late 1940s,
and by the time of the 19th Party Congress, in late 1952, the issue was
‘hardly raised’.30 This situation was reflected in the science curriculum for
post-war Soviet schools, where the emphasis was increasingly, as we have
already seen, on nationalistic themes rather than on the struggle between
progressive ‘materialism’ and reactionary ‘idealism’. Although the need to
develop a ‘materialistic’ worldview amongst students continued to be men-
tioned in teaching manuals and textbooks up to Stalin’s death, it was
clearly no longer a priority in Soviet education. Science teachers were well
aware that anti-religious propaganda was no longer a central, or even com-
pulsory, part of their duties, with one justifying this by stating simply: ‘It
seems to me that the Soviet state relates differently to religion now’.31
This policy of moderation was radically modified by a decree that the
Central Committee accepted on 7 July 1954, initiating a press campaign
that began later that month. This decree, which appears to have been the
work of Khrushchev and his aides, was heavily criticized by Molotov and
others within the collective leadership, who feared it would provoke wide-
spread social unrest.32 This is exactly what it did, by unleashing a wave of
aggressive and uncoordinated anti-religious activity, widely reminiscent of
the 1930s and mostly conducted by eager young Komsomol activists. The
other social organizations that the decree had ordered to focus on the
issue, such as the Academy of Sciences and the ‘Znanie’ society, were
slower to respond and did not manage to organize meetings to respond to
the decree until well into September and October. This was also true of
the Ministry of Education, which was intended to play the central role in
eliminating religious belief amongst youth, with the decree noting that ‘the
teaching of school subjects (history, literature, natural sciences, physics,
chemistry etc.) should be saturated with atheism . . . the anti-religious
thrust of school programmes must be enhanced’.33
The Ministry of Education therefore held a meeting on 29 October 1954
to discuss a document entitled ‘Anti-Religious Education in Secondary
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 259
School’, which officials had already spent two weeks drafting. Presenting
the document, it was noted the type of student who was in need of a more
thorough understanding of the materialist nature of science was one who
‘mastered the laws of physics and chemistry, the laws of the conservation
and preservation of energy, but then, going home, took down her gospels,
read them and sang religious hymns at meetings’. It was therefore essential
not only to teach science in an objective, materialist fashion but to
drive home to students the ideological ‘worldview’ implications of the
science which they studied. The decree to increase the emphasis on atheis-
tic education did not meet with universal approval, with some teachers
complaining the curriculum already over-stretched both them and their
pupils and others querying whether they should be ‘for or against’
independent anti-religious circles set up by their students. There also
remained considerable disagreement on how best to approach the subject;
whilst one delegate demanded a greater focus on the persecution con-
ducted by the Inquisition against progressive scientists during the Renais-
sance, another asked for more ‘contemporary material’ relevant to the
lives of Soviet students.34
The militant campaign that had provoked this meeting was, however,
cut short by a decree issued under Khrushchev’s name on 10 November
1954, which admonished activists for being too radical in their attacks, and
‘insulting believers’. Despite this, it continued to note:

the Central Committee reminds you that the basis of scientific atheis-
tic propaganda must be the popular explanation of the most important
phenomena of nature and society, such as questions of the formation
of the universe, the origins of life and man on Earth, achievements in
the areas of astronomy, biology, physiology, chemistry and other sci-
ences which affirm the correctness of materialist views of nature and
society.35

Therefore, although the furore of the summer had died away by early
1955, leaving teachers and propagandists confused and lacking direction, it
remained clear that scientific education should continue to focus more
attention on combating religious belief, and in the teaching plan for
1955–56 scientific atheism therefore received far more attention than in
previous years.36 An article in Uchitel’skaia Gazeta that October indicated
how one teacher had set about her task:

I described how the law of the conservation of matter discovered by

Lomonosov [sic] can be seen in the endless and eternal universe, in
the eternal cycle of matter. The lecture provided an opportunity for
explaining the erroneousness of both religious conceptions about the
creation of the world ‘out of nothing’, and of superstitious fears of the
‘end’, the ‘destruction’ of the world . . .37
260 Michael Froggatt
This was the essence of scientific atheist propaganda; an assurance that
the world was essentially comprehensible, benign and subject to human
agency. Such teaching continued to enjoy greater prominence in schools in
the late 1950s than during the immediate post-war years, despite the fact
that the visible campaign against the churches ceased in 1954 and was only
reinitiated in 1958. There was also a growing awareness from the mid-
1950s that youth had to be especially targeted by those espousing scientific
atheistic values; it was reported to the Komsomol that in 1956 there had
been 311 applicants to seminaries who were aged 18 to 20 and possessed
full secondary education, and that these had included Komsomol
members.38 There also remained concern at the number of youngsters par-
ticipating in pilgrimages of a ‘mass character’ to any of the more than
thirty ‘holy sites’ scattered across the RSFSR, where it was believed they
were exposed to mystical, and potentially anti-Soviet, ideas while beyond
the reach of Party, state or Komsomol supervision.39 The prospect of a
generation who had known only socialism developing such firm religious
convictions was clearly alarming to ideologues, and increased calls to
target youth with scientific atheistic propaganda; as religious believers
tended to be less likely to read the Soviet press, attend public lectures or
visit the cinema than other sections of the population, the only place that
propaganda could be guaranteed to reach them was the classroom.
What form did the scientific atheism that was now emphasized in teach-
ing take? The truth is that scientific atheism remained remarkably similar,
both in form and content, to the anti-religious propaganda which had first
been seen during the Civil War, although teachers seemed to be develop-
ing an increasing sense of the futility of their task as the years went by.
Biology teachers were expected to contrast Biblical teachings on the
origins of life and mankind with the evidence of evolutionary biology, and
to demonstrate that ‘holy water’ was nothing of the sort by using micro-
scopes to show the bacteria that infested it. Chemistry teachers specialized
in engineering ‘miracles’ and then explaining their scientific basis; such
miracles included the transformation of water into wine, the trans-
formation of copper coins into silver ones or the production of ‘crying
icons’. Physics teachers were to disprove the idea that mirrors and lens
held any mystical significance and explain to students the material causes
of thunder and lightning. During the final year of middle school students
were to have the nature of comets and eclipses explained to them (it had
been noted that school attendance fell noticeably during the solar eclipse
of 30 June 1954, as superstitious parents kept their children at home),40
and the theory of the ‘Big Bang’ was to be decisively repudiated, with stu-
dents being reassured that the universe was infinite both in time and space.
Students were also to be encouraged to make their own observations of
the heavens with cheap, mass-produced Maskutov telescopes, supposedly
available in every Soviet school.41 However, it remains open to question
how many of the physical demonstrations suggested in textbooks were
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 261
practical in Soviet schools of this era that, especially in rural areas,
remained starved of scientific equipment.
The dramatic successes of the Soviet space programme in the late 1950s
and early 1960s also played an obvious role in attempts to inculcate a
materialist worldview amongst students, with Soviet man’s ability to
conquer space (which was definitely not inhabited by God or angels)
driven home to them. These highly visible triumphs of Soviet technology
did appear to make some impact on the outlook of students, with one girl
from Kursk, studying in the eighth grade, noting bluntly in a letter written
in 1957: ‘I don’t believe in religion anymore, and after the launch of the
first satellite of the Earth my disbelief has become greater’.42 Other stu-
dents of the time recall how, after Gagarin’s flight, they ‘all became athe-
ists’ but also remember the gentle mockery and condescension they met
when, returning home from school, they attempted to convert their more
pious grandparents.43 Thus, even if the achievements of the Soviet space
programme did have a tangible effect on the ‘worldview’ of some students,
any hopes that this would have wider resonance amongst believers in their
families appear to have been groundless.
The supposed saturation of the science curriculum with scientific
atheism entailed further difficulties for teachers. Science teachers seem to
have been content simply to teach ‘materialist science’, and assume that
this would create the necessary worldview in their students, rather than
overburden the curriculum with active attacks on established religions and
religious belief.44 Although such a lack of militancy was criticized within
the ideological establishment it was understandable, as teachers were both
overworked and loath to interfere in areas beyond their professional com-
petence. Some teachers appear to have been concerned that they would
effectively be providing a free, if highly critical, religious education; for
instance, one suggested course in zoology for the seventh grade required
the students to be thoroughly schooled in the narrative of the book of
Genesis, if only to ensure they would learn the scientific facts to refute it.45
There was also the concern that teachers were educating students in
superstitions that were already outdated, and which they would not other-
wise have heard about. When chemistry teachers were told to explain the
phenomena of ‘will-o’-the-wisps’ by explaining the nature and origin of
marsh gas, one noted: ‘What if you tell a student about a superstition they
didn’t know anything about, and now they’re interested by it? This is a very
dangerous path’.46 There was also the risk that by using science in such a
crude fashion, science itself might come into disrepute; the author of one
textbook wrote as early as 1952 that ‘chemical miracles’ should not be used,
as they reduced science to ‘charlatanry’ and weakened the resolve of
teachers to engage in more serious propaganda.47 Teachers were therefore
very keen to define whether they should be engaged in teaching ‘materialist
science’, ‘scientific atheism’ or even ‘anti-religious atheism’, although they
never received a clear answer to these queries.48 It is notable that the
262 Michael Froggatt
course in scientific atheism introduced at all pedagogical institutes from
1959 enjoyed no success until it was made compulsory in 1964, and that as
late as 1972 only a third of teachers had received any training in scientific
atheism.49
Apart from using the natural sciences to demonstrate the false nature of
religious doctrine and superstition, students were also educated in the
‘history of the struggle of science with religion’. This subject was almost
invariably studied with reference to the persecution of Galileo and
Giodorno Bruno by the Inquisition, with students often encouraged to
stage mock trials or build lovingly crafted dioramas of Bruno being burnt
at the stake. However, attempts were made to expand this range of sub-
jects, with one teacher suggesting covering ‘how hostile the Catholic
Church was to the invention of the steam engine, and how religious super-
stition hindered the introduction of this important invention for the
masses’.50 However, such stories inevitably had two drawbacks. The first
was that the events they related were over 300 years old and the second
was that they referred to the Catholic Church, whose adherents were only
a minority of the believers in the USSR. Teachers and educators were
obviously aware of the irrelevance of much of this material to students’
own beliefs (whether Russian Orthodox or other denominations), but they
failed to find anything to replace it. One speaker at the conference in
October 1954 also muddied the waters by pointing out that Galileo himself
was a loyal Catholic and the struggles over his ideas had a class essence
which must be taught to students, otherwise they would ‘simply say
“people were ignorant then, they didn’t know anything, but now they do” ’
and this would lead to scientific atheistic education simply being a list of
‘who was burnt and when’.51
The issue of the relevancy of historical material continued to divide ide-
ologues, putting educators in a difficult position. Discussing two proto-
types for a new astronomy textbook in February 1961, reviewers noted
that one of the textbooks said ‘nothing of significance for worldview’, and
especially criticized the authors’ failure to pay due attention to Coperni-
cus. The second text was criticized for including a lengthy digression on
the struggle of Copernicus with the church, and thereby giving attention to
articles of Catholic doctrine already 400 years out of date.52 Alongside the
establishment of the Copernican system, the other great story of the
‘struggle of science with religion’ was that of the development of Darwin-
ism, but Russia again here lacked striking narratives to compare with the
Oxford Debate or the Scopes Trial. Furthermore, the amount of curricu-
lum time devoted to evolutionary theory had to be cut back from 1955,
apparently due to the ongoing controversy over the work of Lysenko, so
students were less likely to receive a full education in the historical devel-
opment of Darwinism than they had previously.53 Students were therefore
likely to conclude that, while Catholicism, and to a lesser degree Protes-
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 263
tantism, were hostile to scientific development, the Russian Orthodox
Church had largely remained silent on the issue.
Given the inherent flaws in much scientific atheistic education, its
failure to address the majority of its audience and the unwillingness of
teachers to engage fully with the subject, it is hardly surprising that five
years after the initiation of Khrushchev’s second anti-religious campaign,
in March 1964, Pravda was still criticizing the authors of science textbooks
for failing to find ‘concrete examples’ to combat religious prejudice in
schools.54 There was no sign that religiosity amongst Soviet youth, or
amongst the population in general, was declining and a survey carried out
amongst readers of Komsomol’skaia Pravda in 1961 indicated that religion
was still considered to be less of a ‘social evil’ than drunkenness, greed,
nihilism, ‘petty bourgeois mentality’ (meshchanstvo) or apathy.55 It should
also be noted that even those pupils who were converted to materialism
were not always grateful for this, as one child who attended school in the
early 1960s recalled: ‘Unfortunately, I believed “science”, but for some
reason I always envied those people from the past to whom science had
not yet shown that God didn’t exist. It seemed to me that life with faith
was much better than materialism’.56 The continuing failure of scientific
atheistic teaching in schools to provide a sense of moral and spiritual iden-
tity for pupils can also be clearly demonstrated by the healthy growth in
the 1960s of denominations other than the Russian Orthodox Church,
which drew their support from cohorts who were increasingly in their
teens and twenties.
It must also be noted that the general attitude towards science fostered
in the Soviet Union at this time may not have been conducive to develop-
ing a ‘materialist worldview’ amongst students. One article aimed at
teachers, for example, condemned as a ‘vestige of the past’ the medicine
woman Afon’kina, who had been exposed in Moscow as having treated
her patients with remedies derived from common hay. This writer saw no
problem in recommending that a ‘materialist’ antidote to such nonsense
was for students to study the work of the uneducated Lysenkoist fraud,
and Old Bolshevik, Olga Lepeshinskaia, who had gained fame through
advocating rejuvenation by means of prolonged baths in soda water, a sen-
sation which had promptly led to shops all over the USSR selling out of
baking soda.57 How students were supposed to recognize the distinction
between these two uneducated old women, one officially denounced and
one officially lauded, is difficult to determine. For similar reasons, the job
of serious science teachers was to become increasingly difficult from the
1960s as dubious new ‘materialist’ phenomena, such as extra-sensory per-
ception, received greater attention in the Soviet popular press. Therefore a
curriculum which aimed at inculcating a rationalist, scientific approach to
nature often ran at cross-currents with more esoteric aspects of ‘science’ as
portrayed in the Soviet media, making the already difficult task of educat-
ing students in ‘scientific atheism’ near impossible.
264 Michael Froggatt
Conclusion
The ideological light in which science was presented in Soviet schools
changed gradually, yet markedly, during the course of the 1950s. The
narrow interpretation of ‘Soviet patriotism’ as revived Great Russian
nationalism was increasingly frowned upon, and science ceased to be pre-
sented as part of a linear narrative of uniquely Russian achievements.
Instead, science could once again be portrayed as the fruit of the work of
an international fraternity of scientists, engaged in a constructive exchange
of ideas conducted across national frontiers, a change in emphasis which
it was hoped would open up the Soviet scientific community to new
ideas and foster economic development. However, this in no way meant
that the natural sciences became purely utilitarian subjects in the 1950s,
concerned solely with developing narrowly technical skills and training a
technocratic elite, as might be imagined given the accusations of
‘economism’ often levelled at Khrushchev. Rather, scientific Promethe-
anism became a core component of the radically utopian agenda that
Khrushchev increasingly came to espouse in the late 1950s, culminating in
the new Party Programme of 1961, and this was expressed in science
teaching in schools.58
The ‘worldview’ that accompanied teaching in science, rational, material-
ist and atheistic, therefore became, if anything, more important during the
course of the 1950s, and during de-Stalinization science education in Soviet
schools became more, rather than less, imbued with Marxist–Leninist
ideology. This is certainly not to suggest that Soviet science education in
the 1950s and 1960s succeeded in breeding a generation of unquestioning
rationalists who believed, as they were encouraged to, that science and
Marxist dialectical materialism went hand-in-hand. Science was to become
one of the central concerns of the ‘men of the sixties’ (shestiadesiatniki) for
the obvious reason that the ideal of scientific truth was too powerful to be
constrained within the stifling ideology of the Soviet state.

Notes
1 See J. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science,
and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1938, College Station:
Texas University Press, 2003.
2 See, for example, I.I. Sokolov, Metodika prepodavaniia zfiiki v srednei shkole ,
Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1951, pp. 12, 34.
3 For the most recent and comprehensive appraisal of these events, see N. Kre-
mentsev, Stalinist Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
4 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2864/2.
5 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2866/13.
6 V.P. Gerasimov, ‘Primery upravleniia razmozheniem i individual’nym razvi-
tiem dikikh zhivotnykh’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 5, 75–7.
7 V.A. Shishakov, V pomoshch’ uchiteliu astronomii, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1950,
p. 86.
8 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/831/9-10; Ibid., 2306/75/839/24-26; Ibid., 2306/75/739/40.
 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 265
9 Compare, for example, M.I. Mel’nikov, Osnovy Darvinizma, Moscow: uchped-
giz, 1952, and Sokolov, Metodika prepodavaniia zfiiki .
10 M.I. Mel’nikov, Osnovy Darvinizma, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1952, p. 196.
11 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/742/10.
12 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2868/23-26.
13 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/730/29.
14 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/3708/146.
15 For the debate surrounding Semenov’s nomination, see A.M. Blokh, Sovetskii
soiuz v inter’ere nobelevskikh premii, St Petersburg: gumanistika, 2001, pp.
271–7, 321.
16 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/3704/72.
17 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/5195/37.
18 Order No. 144 of the USSR Ministry of Education, in Vysshaia skhola: osnovye
postanovleniia, prikazy i instrukstii, Moscow: Sovetskaia nauka, 1957, pp. 86–7.
19 For an analysis for the plenum, see M.J. Barry ‘Science, Technology and
Innovation’, in Martin McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 72–4.
20 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/30-31.
21 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/31.
22 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/32-33.
23 See V. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Russian Science, New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 243, 253 and I.E. Zelinin, Agrarnaia politika
N.S. Khrushcheva i sel’skoe khoziaistvo, Moscow: RAN, 2001, pp. 261–2.
24 Shishakov, V pomoshch’ uchiteliu astronomii, p. 130.
25 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/6490/17, 92–3.
26 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1689/78.
27 A.V. Peryshkin, Kurs zfiiki – chast’ III , Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1958, p. 115.
28 For recent studies of the 1930s anti-religion campaigns, see D. Peris, Storming
the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1998, and A. Luukanen, The Religious Policy of the Stalinist State: A
Case Study: The Central Standing Committee on Religious Questions, 1929–1938,
Helsinki: SHS, 1997; the use of natural science propaganda in the campaigns is
specifically covered in Andrews, Science for the Masses, pp. 99–118.
29 S. Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics
1941–1945, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003, pp. 9,
115–21, 140.
30 M.V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v
1943–1964 godakh: ot p ‘ eremiriia’ k novoi voine , St. Petersburg:
DEAN ⫹ ADIA-M, 1995, p. 46.
31 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/741/50.
32 Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’, p. 50.
33 ‘O krupnykh nedostatkakh v nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagande i merakh ee
uluchsheniia’, in Voprosy ideologicheskoi raboty, Moscow: gospolizdat, 1961,
pp. 61–5.
34 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/5-6, 18, 22, 54.
35 ‘Ob oshibkakh v provedenii nauchno-ateistichskoi propagandy sredi nase-
leniia’, Pravda, 11 November 1954, p. 1.
36 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/4563/1-2.
37 S. Valgard, ‘Nauchno-ateisticheskoe vospitanie detei’, Uchitel’skaia Gazeta, 29
October 1955, p. 2.
38 V. Alekseev, ‘Shturm Nebes otmeniatsia?’: Kriticheskie ocherki po istorii bor’by
s religiei v SSSR, Moscow: Rossiia Molodaia, 1992, p. 219.
39 See, for example, RGANI, 5/16/642/20.
266 Michael Froggatt
40 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/28.
41 These methods of scientific atheistic teaching are summarized in D. Powell,
Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study in Mass Persuasion,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975, p. 114.
42 GARF, 6903/10/14/28.
43 V. Bezrogov, ‘Mezhdu Stalinym i Khristom: religioznaia sotsializatsiia detei v
sovetskoi i postsovetskoi Rossii’ (unpublished MS: Conference Paper for
‘Study, Study and Study! Theories and Practices of Education in Imperial and
Soviet Russia, 1861–1991’, University of Oxford, 14–16 May 2004).
44 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/17, 19–20, 23.
45 O.L. Perishina and A.M. Tsuzmer, ‘Izuchenie zakliuchnitel’noi temy kursa
zoologii’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 1, 53–4.
46 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/29.
47 D.M. Kiriushkin, Metodika prepodavaniia khimii, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1952, p.
29.
48 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/14-17.
49 Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union, pp. 54, 122.
50 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/17.
51 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/58.
52 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1869/75-76, 80.
53 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/4565/9.
54 Pravda, 6 March 1964, p. 2.
55 B.A. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo
mneniia: epokha Khrushcheva, Moscow: Progress-traditsiia, 2001, p. 180.
56 Bezrogov, ‘Mezhdu Stalinym i Khristom’.
57 V.I. Prokof’ev, ‘Nauka i religiia’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 1, pp. 3–13.
58 See Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1961, especially pp. 17, 59–60, 66, 110 for utopian
visions of the utility of space travel, atomic power and cybernetics, and the
impact that these were expected to have on the worldview of the population.
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Index
Academy of Sciences 44, 180–1, 185,
187, 251, 258
agriculture 184, 256
Akhmatova, Anna 193, 199
Andronov, Nikolai 219–22, 224
‘anti-Party Group’ 51, 53, 179
anti-semitism 174
art, painting 13, 209–30
Berggol’ts, Ol’ga 193, 231
Beria, Lavrentii 25, 32, 34, 91, 159, 174
biology 250–66
Brezhnev, Leonid 12, 14, 173, 183–4,
226
Britanishkii, Vladimir 198, 200–1, 205
Brodskii, Iosif 12, 195, 201, 203–6
Bukharin, Nikolai 178
Bulganin, Nikolai 71, 120
Burdzhalov, Eduard 174–5, 177–80,
182–5
bureaucracy, bureaucrats 64, 67–8,
71–5, 80–8, 92, 94, 109–11, 117, 147,
155, 184
byt 35, 37, 103
censorship 11, 231–2, 241–4, 247
chemistry 252–3, 260–1
Chichibabin, Boris 234–5, 242
children 9, 10, 117–34, 261, 263;
children’s literature, writers 124–31;
juvenile delinquency 9, 50, 117–22,
132, 132n13; see also pioneer
movement
citizenship 8, 101–16
coal mining 160–2
‘collective leadership’ 64, 66, 74–5, 176
collectivism 9, 102, 126
collectivization 102, 159, 177, 183–5,
242–3
Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
Central Committee 2, 4, 42, 47, 65–6,
69–70, 74, 87, 91, 123, 175, 177–8,
183–6, 255, 258; local party
organizations 42–59, passim, 64–5;
Third Party Program (1961) 9, 13, 51,
264; 20th Party Congress (1956) 2, 7,
11, 41–51, 64–76, 81, 89–91, 135, 140,
145, 173–6, 178–82, 188, 200, 232, 243;
21st Party Congress (1959) 51; 22nd
Party Congress (1961) 2, 6, 11–12, 41,
51–9, 173, 185, 188, 193
comrade courts 36
consumer goods 102
cosmopolitanism, anti-cosmopolitan
campaign (1948–52) 174
Council of Ministers 24, 69, 107
crime, criminality: anti-Soviet
behaviour 25, 27–42, 46, 87, 121; fear
of crime 30, 118; hooliganism 10, 12,
26, 30, 36, 50, 117–22, 135–8, 142–4,
147, 152n41, 48, 57; reporting 32–5;
speculation 21; 125–6; under
Khrushchev 23, 25–6; under Stalin 21,
117–18, 138, 143, 151n8; violent crime
25–6, 28–34, 118–20
criminal justice 9, 13; amnesties see
gulag; rehabilitation 6, 53, 94, 103,
107–9, 112, 176; ‘socialist legality’ 21,
22, 146; terror, repression 7, 43–4, 52,
54–5, 59, 65, 81, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 103,
107–9, 146, 174, 176, 188, 232–4,
239–42
‘cult of personality’ 2, 8, 15n7, 41, 68,
71, 75, 89, 91, 122, 139–40, 173–4, 176,
178, 181, 184–5, 187, 189, 255–6
Danilov, Viktor 183–5, 189
Dar, David 199, 204–5

denunciation 2, 7, 84–5
dissent, dissidence 5, 12, 14, 27, 45, 47,
59, 147, 206
‘doctors’ plot’ 32
Dudintsev, Vladimir: Not by Bread
Alone (1956) 7, 70, 74–5, 80–98, 139,
145, 148
education 117–23, 133n18, 159–61,
250–66
Ehrenburg, Il’ia 64; The Thaw (1954)
64, 68–70
‘enemy of the people’ (vrag naroda) 21,
23, 31–2, 74, 87, 88–9, 92, 94, 107
engineers, engineering 7, 64, 67–76, 86,
163–5, 168n34, 257
Evtushenko, Evgenii 188, 194, 203,
231–2, 242; The Heirs of Stalin 188,
232, 242
factories 7, 64–80, 137–9, 154–69
formalism 202, 212, 219
Gefter, Mikhail 174, 179, 182, 186–9
Georgia 49, 57–8
glasnost’ 13
Gorbachev, Mikhail 13
Gor’kii, Maksim 22, 37n7
Gulag: amnesties 6, 13, 21–39, 118, 121,
159, 176; political prisoners 23, 27,
234; returnees 22, 24, 25, 26, 29–31,
91, 94, 118, 176, 199, 242; revolts,
uprisings 5, 38n26; slave labour 22,
31, 156–9, 162, 167n7; zek culture
25–29, 35
historical revisionism 3, 11, 12, 173–92
housing: complaints 6, 8, 101–16;
construction 8, 101, 104–5;
housewarming 8, 101, 105, 107;
legislation 106–7
human rights 112
Hungarian crisis (1956) 47, 87, 140, 145,
176, 178
industrialization 92, 102, 148, 155, 177,
220–1, 250
Institute of History 174, 183, 186–8, 189
inventors 7, 64, 67–76, 81, 86
Kaganovich, Lazar’ 176
Kassil’, Lev 124, 129–31
Khrushchev, Nikita: attitude to Stalin 2,
41, 43, 173, 176, 181, 184, 189, 232,
Index 277
243; cultural views 11, 12, 178, 189,
232, 258; dismissal 166, 173, 184,
186–7, 189; ideology 21, 136, 142,
149–50, 154, 264; leadership style 2,
66, 179; personality 4, 142–3; popular
opinion regarding 66, 149–50, 250
Khvostov, Vladimir 186
Korzhavin, Naum 234–5
Kushner, Aleksandr 201
labour 154–69; labour law 154–69;
labour relations 7, 8, 9, 64–79,
154–69; labour reserve 158–61;
turnover 155, 157, 162–3; Wages
policy 154–69, passim.
Laktionov, Aleksandr 210–11, 221
Lenin, Vladimir 177–8, 180, 182;
Leninism 42–3, 141, 179–80, 185;
Lenin mausoleum 43, 51, 55–8
Leningrad 30, 32–3, 101–16, 123, 147,
165, 193–208; Leningrad State
University 141; Leningrad Writers’
Union 44, 193–208
letter-writing 6, 7, 8, 29–32, 36, 54, 56,
71–4, 82–98, 102–16, 120, 122–3,
126–30
Levitanskii, Iurii 234, 237–8, 240, 243,
245
light cavalry (legkaia kavaleriia) 145–6
limitchiki 166
LITOs 195, 197–9, 202, 206
Lomonosov, Mikhail 251, 253
Lysenko, Lysenkoism 13, 250–4, 256,
262–3
Malenkov, Georgii 73, 176
managers 5, 8, 81–2, 92, 155–6, 163, 165
Marxism, Marxism-Leninism 173,
175–6, 179–80, 185, 188, 212, 225, 250,
264
Medvedev, Roy 188
memory 12, 43, 52, 54–5, 91, 93, 94,
199–200, 231–49
Mezhirov, Aleksandr 234, 236, 239–40
Mikhalkov, Sergei 119
Mikoian, Anastas 45, 176
Ministry of Interior 25, 34, 120, 158–9
Mints, Isaac 186–7
modernism 210, 212–13, 223–5
Molodoi Leningrad (Young Leningrad)
198–200
Molotov, Viacheslav 29–30, 38n31 45,
176, 258
Morozov, Pavlik 125, 128, 134n54
278 Index
Moscow 30, 32–3, 57, 80, 165, 194,
207n20, 241; Moscow Artists’ Union
(MOSKh) 209–30; Moscow Art
Theatre (MKhAT) 214; Moscow
State University (MGU) 140–2
Nechkina, Militsa 180
Nekrich, Aleksandr 181, 189
‘New Direction’ (novoe napravlenie)
182–3, 185, 189
Novocherkassk 5, 154
Novyi mir 7, 80–98, 174, 188, 232
Old Communists 43, 52
Orgnabor 158, 161, 162, 168n24
Pankratova, Anna 65, 174–6, 177–80,
182–3
parasitism 10, 36, 144
parenting 10, 121–2, 125–7 see also
vospitanie
Paustovskii, Konstantin 80
perestroika 13, 93, 141, 188
petitioning 101–16
physics 250–4, 256–7, 260
Pioneer movement 119, 122–4
poetry 12, 13, 124, 193–208, 231–49;
poetry day (den’ poezii) 200, 231
Pokrovsky, Mikhail 185
Polish crisis (1956) 140, 145, 176, 178
Ponomarev, Boris 186, 189
popular opinion 1, 2, 5–7, 14, 23, 27,
29–32, 36, 41–59, 64–76, 80–98,
101–16, 120–3, 127–32, 154, 176
press, Soviet 21–2, 32–4, 66–8, 70, 75,
82, 85, 88, 101, 105, 111, 118–19,
143–5
privacy, private life 8, 9, 14, 91, 102,
104–5, 112, 125–6
procuracy 21–6, 34, 120, 137
religion: and science 13, 250, 257–64;
anti-religious campaigns 13, 151n4,
250, 257–64
re-Stalinization 3, 12, 13, 14, 183
revolution, Bolshevik 102, 178, 182–3,
209, 214
Ryvina, Elena 195, 200–1
samizdat 12, 199, 206, 232, 236, 239, 242
Samoilov, David 234, 236, 245–6
scapegoating 81, 91, 94
science 13, 69, 250–66
‘scientific-technical committees’ (NTK)
69, 75
Second World War 30, 69, 102–7, 112,
125, 138, 140, 156–8, 174, 232, 235–9,
247, 258; historiography 177, 180–2,
235; Leningrad blockade 104–7;
literature 127–8, 232, 235–9
‘Secret Speech’ (“On the Cult of
Personality and its Consequences”)
2, 3, 6–7, 13, 41–51, 64–76, 135, 140,
145, 173, 176, 180, 200, 214, 232, 243
sector of Methodology 187–8
Semenov, Gleb 198–9, 206, 207n21
Shepilov, Dmitrii 178
Shestidesiatniki 179, 188, 264
Short Course of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union (Kratkii kurs) 11,
58, 174–5, 177–8, 182–3, 186
Siberia 162, 165
Sidorov, Arkady 174, 182–4
Simonov, Konstantin 80
Slutskii, Boris 232, 234–5, 238–9, 241–2,
244–7
Socialist Realism 10, 13, 82–3, 88, 200,
209–30, 232
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 26; Gulag
Archipelago 26; One Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovich 83, 92–4, 188, 203,
232
Sosnora, Viktor 195, 201–5
Sovnarkhozy (Councils of People’s
Economies) 75, 82, 161
Sovremennik Theatre 214
Stalin, Iosif: cult of personality 1–3, 11,
13–14, 54, 131, 173, 176, 178, 181, 210,
235, 240–2, 255–6; death (1953) 1, 4,
11, 22, 112, 118, 122, 139, 135, 156,
174, 193, 209–10, 231, 241–2, 253–4;
direct criticism of 2–3, 6–7, 41–59, 89,
104, 176, 179, 181, 184, 232, 234,
240–3; history writing 173–4, 181,
188–9, 232, 235; ideology 21, 37n3, 87,
90, 173; literature 233–4, 244–6;
popular opinion regarding 41–59, 89,
176, 199, 241–2; portraits 48–51, 65;
renaming 58, 63n120; statues,
monuments 48–51, 56, 65
Stalingrad 44, 46, 48, 53–4, 58
Stalinism: cultural policy 11, 195,
199–200, 209–30, 231–5, 243–44;
economics 154–69, passim.; mentality
2, 7, 29, 81–98, 242, 251–6
Stiliagi, stiliachestvo 136, 138–9, 143–4,
146–9, 216

students 47, 58, 135, 139–42
Supreme Soviet of the USSR 29, 36,
101, 110, 119
surveillance 9
tamizdat 206
teachers 121, 253–4, 259, 261–2
technicheskie uchilishcha (technical
colleges) 160
technology 70, 81, 165, 224, 250, 261
Trapeznikov, Sergei 184, 186, 189
Trotskyism 51, 177–9, 183
Tvardovskii, Aleksandr 93, 174, 188,
232, 235–6
Ufliand, Vladimir 200–1, 205
Ukraine 141–7
Veterans 106–7, 111
Vinokurov, Evgenii 234, 237, 243–6
Virgin Lands 9, 138, 143, 148, 162
Volobuev, Pavel 179, 182
Voprosy istorii (Problems of History)
174–5, 177–9, 185
Index 279
Voroshilov, Kliment 29, 36, 45
vospitanie (upbringing) 9–10, 117,
120–3, 131
welfare 2–3, 7–8, 106–7
Western influence, interest in West 10,
13, 136, 138, 180, 210, 212–13, 216,
223–4, 254–57
Writers’ Union 193–208, 231–2, 234
Youth 9, 10, 135–53, 196, 260, 263;
crime, deviance 9, 35–6, 50, 135,
142–4, 217; festival (1957) 217;
komsomol 46–7, 118–19, 124, 135–53,
162, 218, 258; komsomol patrols 143,
146; subcultures/alternative cultures
9, 136, 138–9, 144, 149, 216; young
artists, writers 9, 11, 12, 193–208, 209,
217–22
Zhdanov, Andrei, Zhdanovshchina 193,
251–4
Zhestev, Mikhail 125–8
Zinoviev, Grigorii 178
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